Ink of Blood

(This review may contain spoilers).

This was another book I read originally quite a while ago and it’s a book I’ve found myself returning to quite a lot as an enjoyable fantasy book.

I found Ben to be a character really easy to empathise with, considering his need to escape and find some kind of magic that was missing from his life, with the death of Annie. And even though she didn’t really put in an appearance, it was clear just how important she’d been to Ben and I could see how her shadow continued to linger over him.

I liked the fact that Landover, despite being a magical kingdom, was far from what Ben (and me, as a reader) had expected. While I enjoyed seeing and learning about the world, though, I did find that there were some areas where there was something of an information dump; when Ben was learning about the history of Landover, for instance.

I really liked most of the supporting characters in the book, but I would have liked to see a bit more depth to the demons, rather than them just being the bad guys. How much power did they really have in Landover?

One of the things I really liked was how Willow played a part in the book. The whole destiny thing actually worked really well, considering Ben was doubting and didn’t feel any love for her straight away. I thought a lot of his reactions were incredibly realistic, even though some of them did contradict his personality and what he’d said and done before going to Landover.

Out of the more villainous characters, Strabo was probably my favourite, as the dragon had a lot of depth to him and it was particularly good to see that he didn’t really follow the normal ‘rules’ for dragons.

There was less action in this book than I would have liked there to be, but I did like the characters and I couldn’t help but feel bad for the G’home Gnomes…even if they did seem to bring an awful lot of their suffering on themselves. I did like the fact they were so loyal to Ben, even when the others thought they were useless.

I really did enjoy reading this book and I plan to re-read the next books in the series at some point in the future.