To give you an idea of how much I hated the heroine, the first time she’s in mortal peril, I was hoping she wouldn’t survive. When she unfortunately does escape the potentially fatal consequences of the (self-inflicted) accident only to be later gravely wounded by a villain, I literally shouted with laughter because I was so over her nonsense and wanted her to die.
Honestly, I can put up with a lot from my reading, but to have a heroine — in this case Wren Southerland, a healer for the Danubian army — start out stupid and just keep doing stupid things while holding on to the bizarre idea that her stubbornness and selfishness come from being emotional instead of being a moron was almost too much for me to handle. I had to put the book away at the 92% mark when the heroine does something so idiotic that I needed to just sit by myself and take deep breaths in order to handle the swelling in my breast of rage, both at the author and at my need to persevere to the end of this deeply ludicrous book.
I mean, any sympathy I might have had with this protagonist was strained very early on in the book. Wren and her hardass commanding officer, Major Una Dryden, are out on patrol when they scare a spy right out of a tree. The spy breaks his arm rather grotesquely and Una makes the questionable, on many levels, decision to shackle him to the tree by his broken wrist. Wren wants to heal the boy, protesting sepsis and the need to interrogate a living subject, but Una tells her not to be so soft-hearted (!) and to guard him while she goes off to scout.
At this point, I was all “only assholes torture prisoners” and I was super glad Wren disobeyed orders and went to magically heal him anyway… except that the only way this complete numpty could think of to do so was to free him altogether from his shackles, NOT restrain him in any manner whatsoever, and then be terribly, horribly surprised when he runs away as soon as she heals him. I was aghast at how this allegedly seasoned military veteran could make such a rookie mistake but thought to myself, well, her heart’s in the right place, and surely the author is only having her start out daft only to redeem herself by learning to make good choices by the end…