(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I’d really give this book 2.5 stars out of 5. I really liked the concept… but to be honest, I found the book really hard to read. The beginning was intriguing and I had a lot of sympathy for Kahl. I liked seeing his relationship with Mirra and his adopted mother’s other son… but with the sudden jump forward in time, I found it really hard to reconcile the Kahl from later with the one at the beginning. I felt like I kept being beaten over the head with the fact that he was a really awful person… but from the sounds of it, his previous family forgot about him; and he wasn’t exactly treated well when they were seeking protection.
I found it very hard to care about most of the characters in this book. I felt that there was a lot of telling rather than showing. It was very hard to differentiate between the different characters when, most of the time, they were just listed off.
I was intrigued by the mythology about the world, but there seemed to be little in the way of conflict. It was made quite clear who the bad guys were and I felt that the characters seemed like vastly different people depending on the area of the book.
I think this book could have done with being expanded upon and having more of Kahl’s childhood and growing up shown. I wasn’t rooting for any of the characters and I actually felt very close to giving up on this book. I felt it moved slowly and although there were some instances of action, those were few and far between… and not very effective, especially when I didn’t get a chance to experience that action through the characters; only through someone else watching them. There were too many POVs that made it difficult to figure out exactly what was going on.
Quite apart from having a strong dislike of love triangles, I felt that the one in this didn’t work at all, since I couldn’t see any chemistry between the characters. As it stands, I won’t be reading the next book/s in this series.
Ink of Blood 