General Winston's Daughter

From Goodreads:
"When eighteen-year-old heiress Averie Winston travels to faraway Chiarrin, she looks forward to the reunion with her father and her handsome fiancé, Morgan. What she finds is entirely different from what she expected. She realizes that Morgan is not the man she thought he was; and she finds herself inexplicably drawn to another. Handsome Lieutenant Ket Du'kai is like no one Averie has ever met, and she enjoys every moment she spends with him, every delicious flirtation. Averie knows she's still engaged to another man, but she can't help but think about Lieutenant Du'kai, and she wonders if he feels the same."

~~~~~

Sharon Shinn has long been one of my favorite authors, ever since my friend Ami handed me Archangel and said, "Ignore the stupid cover. You'll love this book." Ami has good taste. I've read the entire Samaria series and the Twelve Houses series and enjoyed the worlds and the people that Ms. Shinn has created, even the impossible situations she's put them in sometimes, and I hate being emotionally wrung out at the end of a book. So, needless to say, I'm a fan.

Anyway, it drove me NUTS that my local library didn't have her stand-alone, General Winston's Daughter, and it's been on my to-read shelf for a long time. I'm glad to have read it, but I don't feel that it stands on the same level as Archangel or Mystic and Rider. Maybe it's because the protagonist is young and at the beginning of her life, where impossible decisions are less impactful. Maybe it's because the conflict in the story--the actual war and the events that make Our Noble Heroine question her worldview--is pedestrian. The ringing debate between Conquerer and Conquered and whose lives are *really* being improved has been hashed out time and time again, and I don't feel that Ms. Shinn covered any new ground there. Even the romance has been done. Averie herself wasn't likeable enough to carry the story, and nothing she did was out of the ordinary. So. It's a well-written book that would challenge a young reader as to why they see some people as Other, but it's also a well-beaten dead horse.

Gentle Reader Alert: I found nothing of concern.