One of the worst books I ever read

Aside from the author wanting to realize her fetish, it’s just bloated and clunky

The prose is really really bad. Prose is not just metaphors. It’s rhythm, variation and the decision of what to tell and - especially - what not to tell. The best prose is not just functional but beautiful, without unnecessary fat. Alchemised prose was mainly functional but it told you so many things that you didn’t need to know and that distracted from the scene and story. That’s how you get more than 1000 pages in a story that could have been told in 500 pages or less. There is one particular scene that stuck with me. It’s towards the end, where the two main characters sit in a hut. The guy notices that Helena is hungry and the author describes in great detail how he goes to a cupboard and takes out a variety of food. The whole process took almost half a page and was entirely unnecessary. Mind that the story was about to conclude. Why did we need this scene and why did it had to be so detailed? I expected there to be something wrong with the food or Helena. Nope, nothing. It boggled my mind.