Green

Almost done with Jay Lake's Green, and I feel pretty comfortable passing judgment on it.

Green is a bog-standard fantasy with pretensions to be more.  The protagonist is taken from her home village and raised to be a sort of super-courtier and assassin.  We're already treading in fan territory here.  Throw in the BDSM over-tones, the cat-people, and the portentous overtones, and we're in full-blown fan-author territory.

Lake tries to have his cake and eat it too.  For example, Green ends up setting up a new god for people to worship in a non-violent manner, but the whole climax of the book involves people killing each other.  Similarly, he has a couple of people talk to Green about the fact that if she hadn't been sold into slavery, all of her choices would've been pre-determined anyway, and she would have grown up in a much worse environment.  But then he never actually has her confront the issue; Green insists that she would have been better off without even thinking about the issue at all.