Books like Ash: A Secret History

I skimmed a few pages of an online preview of this before I bought it, and every fiber of literary discernment in my being hissed at me like Gollum, "Gentleses is a stinksy writer, Precious, we will hates iiiiit!" The title should have been my first warning: “A Secret History” acronymed is ASH. Well, isn’t that just clever with a capital C? However, I was intrigued by the subject matter, and the reviews were good, so I bought it anyway. I should have listened to my literary instincts. The problems are apparent right from page one. Bask in the wretched awkwardness:    It was her scars that made her beautiful. [Hrm. I guess I'll have to take your word for it.]    No one bothered to give her a name until she was two years old. Up until then, as she toddled between the mercenaries' campfires scrounging food, suckling bitch-hounds' teats, and sitting in the dirt, she had been called Mucky-pup, Grubby-face, and Ashy-arse. When her hair fined up from a nondescript light brown to a white blonde it was 'Ashy' that stuck. As soon as she could talk, she called herself Ash. [Nice dirty-dirty medieval atmosphere there—not bad, but that's about as good as it gets.]    When Ash was eight years old, two of the mercenaries raped her.     She was not a virgin. All the stray children played snuggling games under the smelly sheepskin sleeping rugs, and she had her particular friends. These two mercenaries were not other eight-year-olds, they were grown men. [Gee, thanks for clearing that up. Otherwise I would assumed they were eight-year-old mercenaries.] One of them had the grace to be drunk. [How nice of him.]    Because she cried afterwards, the one who was not drunk heated his dagger in the campfire and drew the knife-tip from below her eye, up her cheekbone in a slant, up to her ear almost.     Because she still cried, he made another petulant slash that opened her cheek parallel under the first cut.     Squalling, she pulled free. Blood ran down the side of her face in sheets. [Wouldn't the dagger being heated up in the fire cause the wounds to be cauterized, and thus not bleed? I assume it was red-hot, because otherwise what's the point of heating up the dagger in the first place? The child-raping mercenary didn't want her wounds to get infected? God, this book is stupid.] She was not physically big enough to use a sword or an axe [In what way can one be big enough to wield a sword or an axe other than physically? "She was not big enough" would have sufficed.], although she had already begun training. She was big enough to pick up his cocked crossbow (carelessly left ready on the wagon for perimeter defence) and shoot a bolt through the first man at close quarters.    The third scar neatly opened her other cheekbone, but it came honestly, no sadism involved.[Sadism? Two full centuries before the Marquis de Sade? An anachronism, but it's supposed to be a modern translation of a medieval manuscript, so okay, whatever. But how the fuck does a scar open a cheekbone?!] The second man's dagger was genuinely trying to kill her. [Uh, daggers don't have murderous intent. People do.]    She could not cock the crossbow again on her own. She would not run. She groped among the burst ruins of the first mercenary's body and buried his eating-knife in the upper thigh of the second man, piercing his femoral artery. He bled to death in minutes. Remember that she had already begun to train as a fighter. [Yes, I remember; you just told me two scant paragraphs ago.]There's no way I'm wading through 1100 pages of this turgid crap. I got to page 25 and said "No más.” Besides the casual sexual brutality, which is repellent enough, I kept feeling compelled to mentally rewrite sentences as I was reading them in order to make them more aesthetically pleasing—or just make sense. When that happens it's time to pack it in and read something else. Gentleses we hates it foreverrrr!