Reviews - Blood Over Bright Haven

15.7k reviews for:

Blood Over Bright Haven

M.L. Wang

4.49 AVERAGE

tingdizzle's review against another edition

4.25

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

storytimecyrena's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This book was excellent. Well written, creative, gutting and an honest commentary on humanity. No notes, highly recommend.

sloanebwhite's review against another edition

4.75

challenging emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Woooow

gjwagg's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Wang has incredible word usage and sentence structure. The world created in this book is interesting and the tools utilized for magic usage is uniquely thought out and advanced beyond the primitive “wave a wand and say a word”; showing a world that is advancing in its ‘real world’ magic use.

The story is incredibly predictable which is not helped by the boring main character. Written to be naive/stubborn in her beliefs, she doesn’t appear to have any real growth in this area.

Simply having her go from someone who supposedly did not care about people to ultimately sacrificing herself, did not come across as real growth or earned growth. She continually dismisses what supporting characters explain to her. To a point that her main driving trait is never truly advanced to something realistic.

.

Three major things keep the book interesting. 1)The world building, magic system, and how magic is harnessed. 2) The use of fantasy/sci-fi to convey real world struggles, set backs, sexism, and racism. 3) The use of fantasy/sci-fi to coney how 1st world countries use death and slave labor of underprivileged peoples to maintain power.

The last chapter felt it detracted from the story as a whole. It was unnecessary and could have read better as an epilogue from Cara’s perspective with a short paragraph on how her new tribe escaped, with focus on the new way of life…..considering this is a stand alone book