by Andrea Stewart
In this book we follow Lin, the emperor’s daughter who spends her days trapped within the palace together with the boy her father has taken in. One of them will become the heir to the throne, but Lin has lost all memory of her life beyond five years, and she has to play catch-up with the protégé son her father now considers her replacement. But Lin is determined to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic, but it’s a dangerous quest and one that will question not only her father’s reign but the future of hers.
This book was a disappointment to me. The premise was so great, and I loved Lin’s perspective and her as a character. It was interesting and fun and exciting and the bone shard magic, just wow. So, why the disappointment you might ask.
Well, it was an unfocused mess of jumps in time, of an excessive amount of perspectives and no consistent plot to follow along with. I see what the author tried to do here, and the ideas are amazing, the whole story is great too and the characters and their stories too. But it’s too much for one book.
Reading this book was like simultaneously reading five books about completely different things. And the problem that occurred here was that none of the storylines felt even remotely complete, and by that I don’t mean complete as in the ending not being wrapped up (there’s a sequel so…), but I mean incomplete like not having anything that made me want to keep reading.
There were so many different character perspectives in this book that all of them fell flat and ended up one-dimensional. None of the plotlines were fleshed out because there wasn’t enough time for it. It would have been so much better to focus on two POVs in this book, because in all honestly the rest didn’t add anything to the book.
We follow Lin, a smuggler called Jovis, a woman named Phalue and her girlfriend Ranami and a woman called Sand.
Only Lin and Jovis really need to be in this book, because their respective journeys are the only ones that really matter and the only ones that we need to know of. The rest only takes up space and makes it harder to develop an interest in the two larger POVs.
So, I’m disappointed, because the concept was so original and so incredibly interesting, but the execution just fell short here. It was a mess of pages that didn’t seem to have any common threads at all.
And the ending? What even was that? It was like the book lacked a whole bunch of pages at the end. It wasn’t a cliffhanger, it wasn’t a rounded off ending with a promise of more, or a wrapped up ending to this story. The book just ended, like I seriously flipped the page back and forth several times just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
Basically, this should have been three books, three well developed books with a common thread that’d lead the reader from beginning to end and really dig into the characters. Hey, I’d even be there for two books with two POVs in each. It was just too short, way too short for what the author tried to do here, and as a result it ended up flat and one-dimensional.
Which is such a shame considering what an amazing world the author has created here. I’d love to have seen more bone shard magic, to really be there with Lin and learn.
This book gets 3 stars for effort and originality.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a copy.
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