Ink of Blood

(This review may contain spoilers).

Again, though I have read and enjoyed this book before, I liked being able to read it again… even though I remembered who the real bad guy was before I started reading it again.

I have to say, I was really surprised to see that Lucky got away with as much as he did. I felt I would have liked to see him face some more consequences of his actions… at least from his superiors. While there were certain times he did need to act on his own, I felt he didn’t act with a whole lot of maturity, even though I did like his character and seeing his friendship with Bigman, along with his relationship with his uncles. I was left with some confusion about exactly how many people were involved in the Council of Science.

I especially liked seeing Bigman’s loyalty to Lucky, although I felt that he seemed to only have a couple of characteristics that were exaggerated, rather than having the opportunity to get to know him a bit more in depth.

I liked the fact that I saw a bit more emotion from Lucky in this book, though I did feel that he was a bit too good to be true at times. I did like seeing him using his mind and it was good to see he didn’t just trust his safety to his mask all the time. I could really understand his reasoning behind not becoming reliant on it.

It was interesting to see Lucky try to infiltrate the pirates and I did like seeing more of the world in general, as well as learning about things such as the pushguns. It was nice to see that Lucky wasn’t perfect in everything and that he had to use his brain to survive.

There were some good elements of tension, but not as much as I would have liked… even though it was good to see things like the surface of the sun. I felt there was too much talking and I didn’t really get to see much of Lucky’s thought processes as he worked out what was really going on. I felt that Bigman saw more action than Lucky did… even though Lucky did get into a couple of fights.

I did, however, enjoy reading this book and I have the next four books in this series. I definitely intend to read them and see more of Lucky and Bigman and their adventures.