Posted by This book is thick. This book is complicated. This book has a metric fuck load of politics in it. We have a bunch of different characters, a lot of moving parts, a lot of details, and an old school feel to everything. The word choice and sentence structure makes it feel more old school fantasy. This isn’t generally to my taste but this has been a weird book for me as you’ll see at the end of this review.
This starts out with a blood ritual where a few people from the lower class of society are being executed. They’re known as “Jackals” and they are still paying the price for what their ancestors attempted to do to the current ruling class. The Jackals at one point tried to undermine the current government, they have a different gods/religious belief and they’re treated by society at large as just a touch above slaves. The ritual at the beginning of the book was a sacrifice to the goddess of love and blood, it’s an annual ritual where blood letting via throat slitting is the center piece of the festivities. We’re watching this happen through the eyes of one of our many point of view characters. He’s also a Jackal, but he’s unusual, as he’s been allowed to be in the military and not only that, he has leverage and command authority within his regiment. His commander has a matter of fact way of looking at life, and why throw away a soldier who can help him out when it’s rare to find someone with common sense and leadership skills?
There are other points of view but I considered this story to be centered around Azetla. I liked him as a character, he may not be the most flashy character. He’s not a super angsty or sarcastic or charasamatic character that’s super memorable and larger than life. He’s a more nuanced character with more subtle shifts over the course of the book and I really appreciated his character the more I read about him.
I did not like James. James is the bastard son of the emperor and so far he’s enjoyed a cushy but not responsibility filled life. One side of his background provides him a life of luxury, while the other half of his lineage typically had excluded him from any kind of real responsibility. However, Wesley, one of our other POVs, has been spurned by the crown and feels his family has been betrayed and spurned. He’s determined to help overthrow what he believes to be a shitty ruler with his own ruler of choice — the bastard. However, they all get sent on a suicide mission into the desert to figure out what’s happening out there. There’s rumors of demons, of Jin, and of weird black magics. Once they all make it out into the desert things take an interesting turn as we all get to know a ‘demon’ that lived out in the desert. James was super wishy washy, and he just annoyed me. He would show signs of being a decent person but then like scamper around actually doing it. Wesley is a POS and we all know that from the start. At least I think that’s how you’re supposed to feel. He’s got a poor view of basically everyone around him and is actively trying to fuck shit up and doesn’t seem to care who it affects as long as he gets his way. He views Azetla as trash beneath his feat and it bothers me to no end.
The world building in this was fantastic, I really enjoyed the setting, I enjoyed the different cultures, I enjoyed the lack of exposition and the showing instead of telling approach to basically everything. Religion plays a central role in these cultures and the clashing views of gods and morals drive most of the political fuckery going on. There is so much political fuckery, too.
I felt like the prose was the strong point for this book and one of the things I enjoyed most, especially the second time around. I felt like there were a lot of quotable moments —
“He hated this place. It had shown him who he really was and he had not liked the knowledge. No one does at first.”
However, this book moved so, so slowly. Glaciers may be faster moving. I think part of that at least during my first read was because there are so many different cultures or names of people or places that started with M that I was losing my mind. It’s hard to feel like things are moving along when you’re not understanding what’s happening. There are many different points of view within one chapter and so the book head hopped quite a bit, and I didn’t quite get oriented with one character before suddenly we were with a different character and I was off balance again.
So, why is this book complicated and difficult for me to rate? As you may have figured out by now, I read it twice. When I finished it the first time and I was like… how the fuck do I rate this? It was an example of a book that was very off my taste but was also very well written. I was hemming. I was hawing. I was not coming up with a score I felt happy with. Since I thought the prose was a strong point for the book I decided to read the first few chapters again to refresh myself to help narrow in on a score….and then I found myself really enjoying it the second time around. Instead of reading the first few chapters I read the whole thing over again The first time around my “personal enjoyment” score was probably a 5/10. The second time around it was an 8/10.
If you didn’t know, I used to have a fairly complex rubric that went as follows:
- Characters: x/15
- Plot x/15
- Pacing x/15
- World Building x/15
- Writing x/15
- Pacing x/15
- Originality x/15
- Personal Enjoyment x/10
This could add up to a perfect score of 100. I dropped this rubric a couple years ago when I tried out video blogging for a couple of months only to realize it’s impossible with my schedule and child. It was clunky for me to try and read out my rubric and so I ended up dropping it entirely. I still consider all these things when scoring a book but I don’t necessarily write it all out to get a score anymore.
I had to bring it back out for this book in order to get a score because I had so many conflicting feelings about it.
- Characters: 11/15
- Plot: 13/15
- World Building: 15/15
- Writing: 13/15
- Pacing: 6/15
- Originality: 12/15
- Personal Enjoyment (average) 6.5 (I read this twice and enjoyed it a 5 the first time and an 8 the second time)
- 76.5/100 or 7.5/10 for SPFBO
As it turns out, my partner has posted her review and it’s also a 7.5/10 and so our score overall is a 7.5, lol. YOU CAN READ KRISTENS REVIEW HERE