The Foretelling

Title: The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman
Genre: YA
Rating: 1.5/5

Conceived when her mother was raped by fifty men, Rain is destined to be the next Queen of the Amazons. But her mother can't bear to touch her or look at her and leaves her upbringing to the rest of her Amazon sisters. A born warrior, Rain raises a bear-cub as a sister and dreams of a black horse. Then she begins to see a life beyond what she has been taught and begins to wonder about the forbidden...love, peace, mercy.

I've got to admit I wasn't overly impressed with The Foretelling. The story of the next Amazon queen seemed like such an interesting idea, but it just didn't live up to its promise. The narrative felt like a continuous stream of consciousness with little dialogue, which eventually became kind of annoying. And I found it difficult to relate to Rain so I didn't really care about what happened to her. However, I did find the design of the book to be very interesting. Each chapter had an image, like a pictograph, which related to the chapter and was used in place of asterisks in order to indicate lapses in time. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone unless they were extremely interested in Amazons and their depiction in literature.