(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).
There was a lot of potential in this book. The front cover, along with the blurb, immediately caught my attention.
There were some good parts of this book. It was fairly easy to read, and the way the events were told worked really well, despite the constant jumping around between the past and the present. The scenes set before the events of the book could have felt really jarring, but they seemed to work really well, and gave more of an insight into some of the characters.
However, the book lacked any real sense of urgency. Elle spends a lot of the book going between her husband, Bill, and her husband’s best friend, Charlie…who very obviously has a crush on her and is doing his best to seduce her, despite the fact that her son has gone missing and might well be dead.
Despite the title of the book, there’s not really that much detail about the screaming Elle hears constantly. She seems convinced that it’s her missing son and yet…despite this certainty…she wastes so much time of the book doing other things. Like the aforementioned love triangle. And she’s working constantly on her book, which is about an explorer who went to the place Elle ultimately believes her son is in…and yet Elle drags her feet. People grieve in different ways, it’s true…but Elle doesn’t come across as a grieving mother. I honestly don’t understand why she didn’t go to into the timberland as soon as she thought she was hearing her son from there. I don’t have any children myself, but I have four niblings who I absolutely adore…and I can say with 100% certainty that nothing would hold me back from tracking them down if they were lost and I believed I knew where they were.
Most of the book was slow, without much happening…which meant that the last act, the final part of the book, felt really rushed. There was too much buildup and not enough payoff and honestly…I would have liked to see more of the timberland. For a while in the book, I thought it was meant to be another dimension, almost as if it wasn’t quite a real place…but although it was indicated to be a completely different society, it was still a real place. Which, again, meant it made even less sense for Elle not to try and get there back when she first thought the sound belonged to her son.
I would have liked this book better if the focus had been more on Bill. I felt that his grief process was more understandable…and even though I was seeing him through a murky lens, through Elle’s own eyes (and she clearly resented him, if not outright disliked him), there was enough there that I would have been more interested in seeing him as the main character of this book…not Elle.
On the whole, there was a lot of potential in this book…but I was disappointed in the execution. I would read a book more focused on the timberland, though…because the idea of the explorer who visited there, and the war going on, were both intriguing aspects of the book. Sadly, though, neither was enough to make up for what didn’t work here.
Ink of Blood 