(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I felt this book was particularly engaging and easy to read, with a main character who was easy to relate to and who, I felt, worked well as a hero.
There were a lot of things going on in this book. It was a bit confusing at times, but it still kept me reading, so it was clearly doing something right.
Some of the scenes were really enough to make me cringe – especially the one with the container in the storage. That was particularly gruesome – and, of course, my very vivid imagination provided a lot of mental images that were really disturbing.
The information about the history of this country was quite interesting. I did feel able to relate to Alex as a character, even though I felt that he made a few mistakes in his decisions about his actions. A few of those seemed very amateurish, which didn’t necessarily fit with his experience. (Or maybe it’s just all of the books I’ve read that make it quite clear that hiding things from authority figures means that bad things happen).
The asides during the book were a bit confusing, especially because there were too many characters referred to as ‘he’. I was also somewhat confused about the time frame of them.
On the whole, I found the book to be really well-written and I did enjoy reading it. I noticed a few errors, but nothing really major. I think I’d definitely be interested in reading more books by this author in the future.
Ink of Blood 