(This review may contain spoilers).
Having read another book set in this same universe by this author in the past and struggled a bit with it, I was a bit hesitant to read this book, even though I enjoy fantasy. I gave it a chance…but I struggled to get into the book and didn’t really find it easy to engage with until quite far into the book, after Bee was born.
There was a lot of information dumping in this book that I felt bogged the narration down. For someone trained as an assassin, there were areas Fitz seemed to make some amateur errors. I did like the hints of his relationship with his daughter, but I found it hard to differentiate between the different characters of his stepsons. Their characters and skills weren’t really explored very much and I wasn’t given the chance to get to know the characters myself and form my own opinions of them.
I did like the relationship between Fitz and Molly and I felt myself getting frustrated with Fitz at times, considering his actions and decisions to hide things from his family. While I could understand his reasons at times, I felt that he didn’t really help himself and even though there were some hints he wasn’t really that civilised, those hints didn’t really become full-blown until much later in the book.
The switching between two different first person POVs were extremely disconcerting and I couldn’t figure out whose head I was in. There was too much telling rather than showing when it came to Fitz’s perspective and although I did feel quite a bit of sympathy for Bee, there was too much repetition about her. To be honest, by the end of the book, the cliffhanger didn’t really affect me so much. I was expecting it and I felt that the foreshadowing became fairly obvious. Also, by the end, the characters who died were people I didn’t really care that much for.
The world of the book was intriguing, but I found the characters hard to connect with. As this is the second book by this author I’ve read and struggled to enjoy, I don’t think I’ll be reading any more books set in this universe in the near future.
Ink of Blood 