Ink of Blood

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).

(This review may contain spoilers).

I did win the second book in this series in a Goodreads giveaway, but the author kindly offered me a copy of book one to read first.

I did particularly enjoy reading this book. I found it a really intriguing read and I especially found myself growing fond of Viktor and his relationship with Romulus.

I didn’t realise, at first, that this series was a historical one. Even though I don’t know much about that time period in this country, I still found the plot of this book easy to follow. There were some things that I still didn’t understand by the end of the book, but it did hold my attention throughout and kept me reading, wanting to find out what would happen next.

It was interesting to read a book where the playing cards had such a big part in it all. At first, I thought that the ban on playing cards was just because of a really paranoid ruler… but as events unfolded, it became clear that the role the cards played was so much more than it first appeared.

I really liked a lot of the other characters in this book and I would have liked to see more of Viktor’s parents, especially. The masked people were quite scary in every appearance they had… at least before they started taking off those masks.

Empathising with Viktor and Romulus was really easy, though I found myself understanding Viktor’s moments of suspicion, especially given the very first scene in the book. That’s something else I would really like to see explored further in one of the next books.

I did also like the Gypsies… and particularly Belch, who added a level of humour to the book that I thought worked really well. I did have an odd sense of deja vu during his loudspeaker scene, though…

I really liked reading about Romulus’ inventions and it was cool to see them used during the course of the book. I also really liked Blizzard in the book… and the boys’ budding relationships with their female classmates.

I do have book two and have started reading that, but at some point, I would like to read the other books in this series too.