(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I really liked the cover of this book. I’ve always been fascinated by dragons and I was intrigued to see how they would fit into the world hinted at in the book. While there were good elements of foreshadowing throughout, though, I was disappointed that the dragon didn’t make much of an appearance until towards the end.
Even though this book was a sequel, I still found it easy to follow and understand. The world described in the book was an intriguing one and it was good to see Vivian’s relationship with the forest and the animals that inhabited it.
I did find Vivian to be an interesting character. While I wasn’t sure where it came from, the darkness added an extra dimension to her personality and I could understand why she ended up going majorly dark side.
Even though I hadn’t met them, by the end of the book, I felt like I’d got to know something of Clover and Red. It was easy to feel the sense of loss from Vivian, but I would have liked to see something more of her interactions with some of the other characters. For instance, there was a friend who was named but then never appeared again.
It was kind of hard to see that Vivian cared about all of her people. I felt she was too willing to sacrifice others, but most of those who died just seemed like cannon fodder. Their characters weren’t really shown to the extent that I, as a reader, could care about them.
The other thing I felt was really hard to read were the feelings Kael and Vivian developed for each other. I felt it read more like insta!love and as a reader, their relationship just seemed to have been placed to make a later scene effective… but that later scene felt very surreal and I thought it would actually be revealed to be a dream or hallucination.
Learning about Vivian’s family history was interesting, but I was still left with questions even by the end of the book. And I really didn’t like the Redwoods, as their intent came across as malicious at worst, uncaring at best by the end.
I probably wouldn’t mind reading more books by this author in the future, but I felt this book could have done with an editor, as I did notice quite a few errors.
Ink of Blood 