Ink of Blood

Just like the previous book I read, this book immediately grabbed my attention when I saw it in the book shop. The blurb sounded very interesting and I was immediately curious to see how such a society worked, where the only death came at the hands of the scythes…people just the same as those who they glean.

I found it interesting to get glimpses into how different scythes made their choices on who to glean. While it seemed like Faraday was one of those who did his best to be as fair as possible (using statistics from the Age of Mortality, treating each person like an individual and picking different, unique ways to glean each of them), I also felt that there was a fundamental element of unfairness to it. For instance, he picked someone based on the possibility that this person might have gone out drinking and driving, despite there being no evidence to indicate that person would do so. But then, I guess it’s hard to make a choice like that, to take someone’s life, no matter what kind of spin you put on it. Still. Since natural death was entirely eradicated, it felt grossly unfair to glean someone who hadn’t even reached their majority yet. I preferred Scythe Curie’s way of gleaning, even though it wasn’t the perfect way of doing so.

I really liked both Rowan and Citra as individual characters, and I really enjoyed their separate storylines. However, I didn’t think the romance between them worked. I didn’t feel that the two of them had really interacted enough for their feelings to be realistic. To be quite honest, I would have been more interested in a book exploring a potential relationship between Rowan and Volta. In comparison to Citra, Rowan spent a lot more time with Volta…and seemed to actually get to know him more.

I liked the inclusion of the writings from the different scythes. Those allowed me glimpses into more of their personalities…and although I absolutely hated Goddard, his writings gave me more of a glimpse into his mindset and personality than I really wanted. And while I agree that the scythes shouldn’t actually enjoy their work…I can’t help but think how scarring it would be to someone’s soul to be in charge of mass gleanings like he was. It’s clearly bad enough for the ‘good’ scythes to glean one person at a time (Citra’s observation of Faraday after gleaning a child springs to mind)…I feel like someone having to mass glean like that would quickly self-glean after only a very short period of time.

All in all, this book was a really interesting, unique idea. While reading, I had a lot of thoughts of, ‘What would I do in this situation?’ And even though I’m not interested in reading about the romance between Rowan and Citra, I am interested in seeing more of both of them as individual characters…as well as more of the world itself…so I do intend to read the next book in this series in the future.