My biggest issue was Bradley's overpowering method of pushing her own agenda and beliefs in the book. She tried creating this book with all these feminist ideas and ended up creating a bunch of female characters that were almost entirely loathsome, and male characters that were so incredibly stupid that you couldn't respect them. It seemed like by the end there were no characters left for you to sympathize with. I know that you're supposed to identify with Morgaine, but I found it impossible. There were a number of points in the book where you thought you had finally seen some sort of character growth, only to find you'd been bamboozled when two paragraphs later the character is back to being the same tired stereotype they've been through the entire book. Even Morgaine showed little or no growth from the start to the finish of the book.

I also wasn't a huge fan of the way that people would look at one another and basically be able to tell everything about them. There must have been dozens of times in the book where someone would look at someone else and fall in love, or know that they were in love with someone. It got old really fast.

The other thing I would have liked to see was a bit more work on the descriptions in the book. Bradley's style of description was quite lacking, with such simple descriptions as "the castle was old gray rock" instead of describing the castle itself. This is a common criticism of character driven works, but in the fantasy genre one comes to expect a bit more descriptiveness about the setting to help draw you deeper into the story...and this was sadly lacking. Bradley relied too much on the readers preconceived notions of Arthurian settings, and I think it was a big shortcoming in her book.

There was quite a bit more about the book that I hated, but I guess I could sum it up by saying that I don't really think it was the story that was lacking, rather I think it was the characters and the writing. Bradley is a quite capable author, I've read many of her Darkover books and enjoyed them, but I couldn't enjoy this book even though I went into it really wanting to. A little more subtlety, a little character growth, and some adequate descriptions and I might have enjoyed the book. As it is, I hated it. In spite of that I do actually intend to give it one more chance; I'm going to read through it again to see if I can't ignore, or at least put on the backburner, some of the things that bothered me so much the first time through.

Edit: though I say "feminist" I wouldn't exactly call what she's pushing as feminist ideology. Feminist ideology I have no problems with...I'm just not entirely sure what to call Bradley's agenda in this book, and I think it may have been what she thought feminism should be.