Book: Blood Iron and Bone by Jayne Starwing, Sera Foxe
Reviewed by Your_bookish_fantasy
Rating: 3/5
This is a high fantasy debut novel by 'Sera Foxe' Hats off to the authors (I didn't realize Sera Foxe was a pen name for 2 authors) for weaving 6 pov's into 1 storyline...via third person, with an omniscient narrator. Ever since I read the synopsis, I had excited, high hopes for it, but my expectations just weren't met.
What was great was that the first pages of the book offer the reader a pronunciation guide, Also, at the end of the book is a glossary which would have been helpful to know at the start but still great none the less.
So the whole story takes place in about 2 to 3 days. I feel the pace in the first half of the book should have picked up more, and it could have been quite a bit shorter without all the repeated descriptions and/or if it were more straight to the point.
The second half of the book had much better, if not great pacing, at that point, I was sucked into the story. It even got to the point where I wanted the chapters to be longer before the story continued but in another POV.
As for the story- This is a challenging read, I'm hoping it's got another round of editing or two before being published because it would be ever such a shame to release it like this when a bit of spit and polish and it could be an enjoyable, great read.
It shows a lot of promise, but ultimately, reading it like this- it just didn't fully win me over. I struggled with a few parts of the story, having to skim read a fair bit at the start because of the amount of utterly useless, repetative descriptions! Some more of the bigger challenges for me were: the use of 6 different POVs combined with the third-person narrative, which together, affected the pacing of the book.
Another irritation was the flicking between past and current tenses. I got so lost in the previous memories and current timeline that I then became lost in the story itself, particularly by chapter 9.
Keeping track of all the characters and their storylines was often quite overwhelming, especially at the start of the book. There was just far too many characters getting introduced one after the other, filling the entire first quarter of the book, way before the plot really took off leaving nothing to get your teeth into.
I kept having to flick back and forth to re-read parts, to just try and work things out - and this was happening all too frequently for me. I found myself getting confused, especially early on, and it took me out of the story each time- which made it even more difficult to fathom what was going on.
The main characters all have their own purposes, goals, and motivations, as did a lot of the side characters in the book. I liked how all of the characters are trying to find out who they truly are, and reading about how they manage, make choices, deliberate and move forward with everything that comes their way is very entertaining and a nice change from only seeing the MC's go through this.
Every character is described in absolute detail- too much detail.
The writing style wasn't one of my favourites. Personally it was just all over the place, like the ideas came to fast to get down, or, that the author just got stuck on one particular point and had to completely, absolutely totally ensure, with no shadow of a doubt that readers 10000% understood what they were saying... Did you get it... It's annoying to keep going on about the same thing, right?
Also there was a mix of modern language and outdated terms that did not work well together for me, then there was the addition of the over-the-top words, as if found through a theasaurus and shuved in to make it sound less simple and basic, which just felt completely out of place within the rest of the mixed writing.
Despite the struggles, I did generally enjoy it and I did appreciate the plot and world-building and I will be reading the next one because the story is so different it's worth a shot- hence my first comment of hoping this gets another round of editing before publishing. (Looking at all the other reviews it seems we're all saying the same thing- too rushed, too crowded, to repetitive but great bones to the plot, so much so that with a bit of love this could easily be a 5* book)
I want to thank Netgalley and Sera Foxe for providing me with the ARC of this book.