This book has been on my radar for the longest time, and I've been really looking forward to reading it. A lot of my writer friends were giving it such great praise! So I had high expectations going in, and... unfortunately, they didn't pay off. :( I did find a number of cool ideas here and an interesting way to look at structuring stories that are heavy on found family and interactions between characters in an ensemble cast. Those ideas are laid out clearly and comprehesibly in the book... many times over. All of it is just so repetitive! I think I'd have liked this more as a short series of blog posts that get to the point.

I also didn't like how the term "the Heroine's journey" is so gendered? Yes, the author states multiple times that characters of any genre can be heroes or heroines. But why bring in a gendered term at all? The archetype the author calls a 'heroine' may as well have been named a leader, since their role is basically to bring people together and delegate tasks/areas of influence to them. Or a harmonizer, a unifier, something along those lines. If we're talking about a non-gender-specific role in the narrative, why use a gendered world for it and tie all those gender stereotypes to that? You know, the man/hero goes out alone in the night and slays the mamoth, the woman/heroine stays in the cave and keeps the hearth warm for everyone to gather round, all that.