Daughter of the Forest is a re-telling of a Celtic myth in which 6 brothers are turned into swans by their evil step-mother. Their little sister must obey a vow of silence and weave 6 shirts out of prickly nettles and clothe them to return them to their original forms. The author, Marillier, sticks pretty close to this plot, and sets the story in ancient Ireland.

Although the story is about the brothers' curse, the book takes a while to get to it. Before the evil step-mother arrives, Sorcha (the little sister) nurses an unstable man tortured by her own people back to health. The uneasy relationship between Sorcha and the man, Simon, was compelling, and I wanted very much to see how it played out, but once the glacial pace finally picked up and the main plot began, Simon disappears. He reappears only at the end of the book, and ends up being a completely irrelevant character. I'm guessing the only reason he's in the book at all is to set up something in the sequels.

About halfway through the book, there is a brutal, sexually explicit scene. At this point, I stopped reading and skimmed the rest of the book because the scene put me off. I don't mind violence, usually, but this scene seemed gratuitous, inserted only to shock the reader and heap additional woe on a character who has already reached the angst limit.

It seems that I was right to stop, as from what I could tell the book turns into a run-of-the-mill romance, complete with a perfect man who is manly and sensitive and eager to rescue fair maidens from villainy. I myself don't like this kind of thing, and didn't like to see the book change from an adventure story into a Harlequin romance.

On the bright side, the characters of the brothers are interesting, each one distinct and well-drawn. The warm relationship between Sorcha and her brothers was great, and is a rare example, in my experience, of sibling camaraderie and friendship in fiction. Sorcha herself is a strong character, but perhaps comes off as being too strong, almost angelic -- she never seems to waver in her determination to save her brothers, not even after what she endures.

Although I didn't end up liking it, it is a pretty good book -- at least for the first half -- and most other reviews I've seen of it have been overwhelmingly positive. The quality of the writing itself wasn't bad, it was just that the author wrote about things I didn't want to read about. I may pick up the sequels, in the hopes of seeing more of the brother characters.