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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
I thoroughly enjoyed this. It has more world building than in Of Fire and Stars, but there wasnt any info dumps which was a relief. Although I did guess some of the twists, there were plenty more to keep me guessing and interested.
I thoroughly loved Of Fire and Stars, but I felt like Inkmistress explored the depth of Audrey's writing to a whole other level. Between the strong prose and the darkness of the plot, I was hooked from start to finish.
This book has a pretty heavy romance component and it uses that to explore several things: what really is love, the difference between infatuation and love, how much of yourself gets tied up in other people, when it's time to let go, and so forth.
Plus it has dragons and magic and dealing with fate and a bisexual main character!!
This book has a pretty heavy romance component and it uses that to explore several things: what really is love, the difference between infatuation and love, how much of yourself gets tied up in other people, when it's time to let go, and so forth.
Plus it has dragons and magic and dealing with fate and a bisexual main character!!
Book Review
Title Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars #0.5)
Author: Audrey Coulthrust
Genre: YA/Fantasy/LGBT
Rating: ***
Review: I didn’t know much about Inkmistress before getting into it other than it was the prequel to Of Fire and Stars. The opening of Inkmistress introduces us to Asra who is a demi-god, her father is the Wind God and she has the ability to dictate the future by writing with her blood so she remains hidden in the mountains working as a healer in order to hide her ability from the world. The only true happiness she has in her life is Ina, a mortal give who she is in love with but when winter fades and Ina returns she tells Asra that her parents want her to get married in order to form an alliance with another village to protect them from the bandit which are moving in their directions. However, Ina technically can’t marry until she finds her manifest, which is like the daemons from His Dark Materials, and people get their manifest by forming a magical bond with an animal so she asks Asra for help in getting her manifest as the time she should have spent training she spent with Asra.
In order to help her lover Asra performs a blood rite in order for Ina to find her manifest and protect her family, however, the next morning it turns out that bandits have raided the village and killed everyone including Ina’s family. In her anger and grief Ina calls the dragon to her and bonds with it making it her manifest and Asra knows this is the worst possible outcome. It also turns out that Ina doesn’t just have an extremely deadly manifest she also has the power to wield magic which is an ability which only belongs to the royals. These very royals are the people Ina blames for the death of her family as the boar King had refused to send help to protect the village from the bandits and Ina is going to use her new powers to destroy them all despite Asra’s protests. Seeing the girl she loves on a mission for revenge when she had been so kind and gentle as a mortal, Asra knows it is her fault and she has to fix it before it is too late. Asra follows Ina but fails to prevent her from killing the bandits that destroyed her village and she gets no satisfaction from it but rather than seeing that revenge isn’t the answer she turns her attention towards the boar King and his death and leaves once more. Asra continues to try and track Ina down but along the way she meets another demi-god in the form of a boy named Hal, we don’t know which God is his parent but he has some sneaky gifts and I can’t wait to see what happens with him.
From Hal she learns about the Nightswifts, a gang who were the King’s former elite assassins but have separated from the crown and all have a bounty on their head and Hal’s sister is one of them. After escaping the town with Hal, they are captured by the Tamers, a faction of people that tame their animal companions instead of manifesting them like Ina did. They want to dragon removed from their forest and Asra offers to climb the cursed cliff in order to get Ina to leave. When she meets her lover there she comes clean about what her ability does and that she is to blame for the death of her family, Garen and the others. Ina completely destroy Asra by telling her that she didn’t love her she was just using her to become an elder and that she had cheated on her with Garen and was pregnant with his child and she once again disappeared. However, in the cave she meets a man who claims that he knows which God she belongs to, Asra thought it was the Wind God but the Wind children like Hal and his siblings can hear each other from leagues away. It turns that she is the sibling of Veric who was also a bloodscribe and she has the power to wield the Fatestone which is what both the boar King and the NIghtswifts are after and with it she can right the wrong and drive out the darkness and bring light to the world.
Asra asks Hal to come with him to meet the Nightswifts and his siter, Nismae as she as the former scholar and assassin might have some knowledge on Atheon and the secrets it contains. Nis tells Asra that Atheon is lost as the Fox King burned all the documents relating to it and all the entrances have either collapsed or been built over so the only person that knows the way in is the shadow God. Asra hasn’t told them that she knows the location of the Fatestone or why she needs to go to Atheon despite being offered a place among them because she her abilities. Knowing that the Nightswifts have nothing that can help her Asra knows she has to leave but she isn’t quite ready to leave Hal and things get even more complicated when Ina shows up asking to become a member of the Nightswifts. Ina betrays Asra further by telling Nismae of her abilities and she spends the next few days being bleed for her blood so that the Nightswifts can make Ina a Queen but eventually Hal comes to his senses and rescues her, but both know the Nightswifts and Ina will be coming after them. They have two options now, either get into the Grand Temple or find Hal’s uncle who might be able to help them. When the first option doesn’t work they go after the second but here Hal learns that he has also been betrayed by his sister who has been lying to him for years and the only option Asra has now is to go directly to the King. When she meets with the boar King he explains how the challenges work and she explains that Ina’s growing powers prove a real threat to him and he asks her of her own free will to give up her blood to recreate the enchantments for him so Ina won’t succeed and she agrees pledging her service to the King, Ina’s swore enemy. However, she hasn’t given up on finding the Fatestone but this drive a rift between her and Hal as Hal doesn’t want to live in a world where he never met Asra because she has rewritten the past and the pair are obviously falling in love. However, we know that time is against them and they don’t have long before Ina comes to challenge the King.
As time is running out Asra is fighting hard to protect the King and stop Ina but it isn’t going to plan, however, the King gives her a token to visit the Grand Temple and after learning of Hal’s mission to find the only living bloodscribe, her, she is hurt and angry so she heads to the Temple for guidance. Despite knowing the gods won’t speak to her, Asra has to try and she is surprised when the Shadow God appears before her and she learns not her father but her mother is the God where she gets her gifts from. Her mother explains the circumstances of her birth and why she was left alone and her mother asks her why she is seeking the Fatestone and when Asra relays her tale, her mother gives her the information she needs to find the Fatestone but she also gives her a warning that whether she changes the past or the future, ripples will be felt across the land and she needs to be prepared to wield that power at any cost and Asra agrees. When the day of the challenge draws near, Hal has left her and Asra is alone but she doesn’t dwell on it opting to throw herself into her work but when Hal returns telling her than Ina has gone into labour and is asking for her, Asra has a difficult choice to make, does she help her former lover give birth to the child of a man she killed or does she leave her to suffer the consequences of her chooses. Asra helps her friend give birth but she wants nothing to do with the child and tells Asra to raise him as her own and to name him Iman.
After returning to the palace she and Hal make up and she finally connect the dots given to her by her mother and realises that Hal is the key which will lead her to the Fatestone. She finds it and has it on her finger no more than a few minutes when she is attacked by Nismae who takes it from her and leaves her in Veric’s tomb. After escaping she tells Hal what has happened but the challenge for the crown has now arrived so she can’t leave again as she has to protect the King so Hal offers to use his thieving abilities to get the Fatestone back so Asra can set the world to rights. The ending of Inkmistress was action-packed and I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen until it did but the actual ending itself left me a little underwhelmed and I think another 50 pages could have easily fixed that to give the ending a little more clarity on what Asra actually did with the Fatestone as it is unclear but it might become a little clearer in Of Fire and Stars. One thing I dislike was the LGBT representation, yes initially the female/female romance between Asra and Ina was wonderful but the second Ina betrayed Asra it seemed to just be a plot device, it would have been a heterosexual couple and it would have had the same effect. The LGBT romance brought nothing to the book and it didn’t really serve much purpose except to cause conflict and give the book purpose to move forward which isn’t why LGBT romance should be used in books. If you want a good book where the LGBT romance adds so much to the novel without being a plot crutch read They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
Title Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars #0.5)
Author: Audrey Coulthrust
Genre: YA/Fantasy/LGBT
Rating: ***
Review: I didn’t know much about Inkmistress before getting into it other than it was the prequel to Of Fire and Stars. The opening of Inkmistress introduces us to Asra who is a demi-god, her father is the Wind God and she has the ability to dictate the future by writing with her blood so she remains hidden in the mountains working as a healer in order to hide her ability from the world. The only true happiness she has in her life is Ina, a mortal give who she is in love with but when winter fades and Ina returns she tells Asra that her parents want her to get married in order to form an alliance with another village to protect them from the bandit which are moving in their directions. However, Ina technically can’t marry until she finds her manifest, which is like the daemons from His Dark Materials, and people get their manifest by forming a magical bond with an animal so she asks Asra for help in getting her manifest as the time she should have spent training she spent with Asra.
In order to help her lover Asra performs a blood rite in order for Ina to find her manifest and protect her family, however, the next morning it turns out that bandits have raided the village and killed everyone including Ina’s family. In her anger and grief Ina calls the dragon to her and bonds with it making it her manifest and Asra knows this is the worst possible outcome. It also turns out that Ina doesn’t just have an extremely deadly manifest she also has the power to wield magic which is an ability which only belongs to the royals. These very royals are the people Ina blames for the death of her family as the boar King had refused to send help to protect the village from the bandits and Ina is going to use her new powers to destroy them all despite Asra’s protests. Seeing the girl she loves on a mission for revenge when she had been so kind and gentle as a mortal, Asra knows it is her fault and she has to fix it before it is too late. Asra follows Ina but fails to prevent her from killing the bandits that destroyed her village and she gets no satisfaction from it but rather than seeing that revenge isn’t the answer she turns her attention towards the boar King and his death and leaves once more. Asra continues to try and track Ina down but along the way she meets another demi-god in the form of a boy named Hal, we don’t know which God is his parent but he has some sneaky gifts and I can’t wait to see what happens with him.
From Hal she learns about the Nightswifts, a gang who were the King’s former elite assassins but have separated from the crown and all have a bounty on their head and Hal’s sister is one of them. After escaping the town with Hal, they are captured by the Tamers, a faction of people that tame their animal companions instead of manifesting them like Ina did. They want to dragon removed from their forest and Asra offers to climb the cursed cliff in order to get Ina to leave. When she meets her lover there she comes clean about what her ability does and that she is to blame for the death of her family, Garen and the others. Ina completely destroy Asra by telling her that she didn’t love her she was just using her to become an elder and that she had cheated on her with Garen and was pregnant with his child and she once again disappeared. However, in the cave she meets a man who claims that he knows which God she belongs to, Asra thought it was the Wind God but the Wind children like Hal and his siblings can hear each other from leagues away. It turns that she is the sibling of Veric who was also a bloodscribe and she has the power to wield the Fatestone which is what both the boar King and the NIghtswifts are after and with it she can right the wrong and drive out the darkness and bring light to the world.
Asra asks Hal to come with him to meet the Nightswifts and his siter, Nismae as she as the former scholar and assassin might have some knowledge on Atheon and the secrets it contains. Nis tells Asra that Atheon is lost as the Fox King burned all the documents relating to it and all the entrances have either collapsed or been built over so the only person that knows the way in is the shadow God. Asra hasn’t told them that she knows the location of the Fatestone or why she needs to go to Atheon despite being offered a place among them because she her abilities. Knowing that the Nightswifts have nothing that can help her Asra knows she has to leave but she isn’t quite ready to leave Hal and things get even more complicated when Ina shows up asking to become a member of the Nightswifts. Ina betrays Asra further by telling Nismae of her abilities and she spends the next few days being bleed for her blood so that the Nightswifts can make Ina a Queen but eventually Hal comes to his senses and rescues her, but both know the Nightswifts and Ina will be coming after them. They have two options now, either get into the Grand Temple or find Hal’s uncle who might be able to help them. When the first option doesn’t work they go after the second but here Hal learns that he has also been betrayed by his sister who has been lying to him for years and the only option Asra has now is to go directly to the King. When she meets with the boar King he explains how the challenges work and she explains that Ina’s growing powers prove a real threat to him and he asks her of her own free will to give up her blood to recreate the enchantments for him so Ina won’t succeed and she agrees pledging her service to the King, Ina’s swore enemy. However, she hasn’t given up on finding the Fatestone but this drive a rift between her and Hal as Hal doesn’t want to live in a world where he never met Asra because she has rewritten the past and the pair are obviously falling in love. However, we know that time is against them and they don’t have long before Ina comes to challenge the King.
As time is running out Asra is fighting hard to protect the King and stop Ina but it isn’t going to plan, however, the King gives her a token to visit the Grand Temple and after learning of Hal’s mission to find the only living bloodscribe, her, she is hurt and angry so she heads to the Temple for guidance. Despite knowing the gods won’t speak to her, Asra has to try and she is surprised when the Shadow God appears before her and she learns not her father but her mother is the God where she gets her gifts from. Her mother explains the circumstances of her birth and why she was left alone and her mother asks her why she is seeking the Fatestone and when Asra relays her tale, her mother gives her the information she needs to find the Fatestone but she also gives her a warning that whether she changes the past or the future, ripples will be felt across the land and she needs to be prepared to wield that power at any cost and Asra agrees. When the day of the challenge draws near, Hal has left her and Asra is alone but she doesn’t dwell on it opting to throw herself into her work but when Hal returns telling her than Ina has gone into labour and is asking for her, Asra has a difficult choice to make, does she help her former lover give birth to the child of a man she killed or does she leave her to suffer the consequences of her chooses. Asra helps her friend give birth but she wants nothing to do with the child and tells Asra to raise him as her own and to name him Iman.
After returning to the palace she and Hal make up and she finally connect the dots given to her by her mother and realises that Hal is the key which will lead her to the Fatestone. She finds it and has it on her finger no more than a few minutes when she is attacked by Nismae who takes it from her and leaves her in Veric’s tomb. After escaping she tells Hal what has happened but the challenge for the crown has now arrived so she can’t leave again as she has to protect the King so Hal offers to use his thieving abilities to get the Fatestone back so Asra can set the world to rights. The ending of Inkmistress was action-packed and I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen until it did but the actual ending itself left me a little underwhelmed and I think another 50 pages could have easily fixed that to give the ending a little more clarity on what Asra actually did with the Fatestone as it is unclear but it might become a little clearer in Of Fire and Stars. One thing I dislike was the LGBT representation, yes initially the female/female romance between Asra and Ina was wonderful but the second Ina betrayed Asra it seemed to just be a plot device, it would have been a heterosexual couple and it would have had the same effect. The LGBT romance brought nothing to the book and it didn’t really serve much purpose except to cause conflict and give the book purpose to move forward which isn’t why LGBT romance should be used in books. If you want a good book where the LGBT romance adds so much to the novel without being a plot crutch read They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
3.5 STARS
TW: blood, self-harm (comes with the territory of the magic)
Ever since I read Of Fire and Stars a while back, I was hoping for a sequel (which it is getting!), but for the uninformed, this is a PREQUEL. It's set some 200 years before OFaS in the same world, and I am so happy to report that I had a really good time reading it!
The magic? Fascinating. The antagonists? Plural and interesting. The love interest? An absolute sweetheart and a thief (read as: another thief character I love with my whole damn heart). The magic system? Unique and loaded with consequences for its use (albeit maybe a tiny bit underdeveloped and vague at times). It just had so many elements of things that I adore, and that kept me hooked to it the whole time. Plus, the main character is kind of a disaster and honestly? It was pretty refreshing to have a character who made mistakes and was out of her depth and afraid of the options before her. Not to mention lovesick, for better or for worse. Asra is far from being perfect, which I appreciated a ton, especially since she's a demigod.
The other thing I really appreciated was that this world isn't homophobic or biphobic. The tension doesn't stem from that. It stems from the fact that a whole village is dead and gone, and the blood is on Asra's hands, not to mention that she is not a killer by any stretch of the imagination. She is as peaceful as possible whenever she can be, and yet all this tragedy keeps happening around her. In most books, I think a character like her would intentionally become a killer to survive, but somehow, she didn't. She grew, but that particular core stayed largely the same, and when so many stories lately are about characters becoming hardened to the world around them in order to get by, I'm really pleased that Asra didn't do that here.
Oh, and circling back a little, I'm actually delighted with the representation of bisexuality here. By now, I think a lot of folks heard about the review that painted this as a somehow lesser depiction of bisexuality because the final couple is M/F, but that's. That's literally how bisexuality works. Asra is shown to be in love with another girl, and later, she's in love with a boy. If she was only ever in love with Ina, only ever in love with girls, she'd be a lesbian and not bi. And bi folks who are in love with someone of the opposite gender are not any less bi for it.
I may have some strong personal feelings about this tbh, but we'll move on because I get the impression most folks knew that review was a load of, pardon my French on this fine morning, shit.
Anyway, I did only give this 3.5 stars, and that's because I think Coulthurst's writing is a little...clunky, for lack of a better word. Her dialogue is hard to like sometimes (except Hal, that wonderful, thieving scamp), and usually comes across as stiff or contrived. And while she certainly moves the plot along with a number of subplots in the book that lead to something greater, the amount of time she spends on each subplot feels out of balance, so we learn more about a set of characters we really never see again, and about characters who had the potential to drastically change the outcome of the story. Additionally, I thought Ina was going to be a much more important antagonist than she was. I loved what I saw of her, but I don't think I saw enough of her at the right times to enjoy the ways she helped shape the plot.
Overall, I had a good time reading Inkmistress, and I'll happily spend a good three or four hours in Coulthurst's world when the OFaS sequel or other related books come out. It's fun, it's a great break from reality (which doesn't have nearly enough dragons), and even if bits of it result in a less than well-oiled machine, I'm still in a good mood when I'm done. And that's good in a book. That's so good.
TW: blood, self-harm (comes with the territory of the magic)
Ever since I read Of Fire and Stars a while back, I was hoping for a sequel (which it is getting!), but for the uninformed, this is a PREQUEL. It's set some 200 years before OFaS in the same world, and I am so happy to report that I had a really good time reading it!
The magic? Fascinating. The antagonists? Plural and interesting. The love interest? An absolute sweetheart and a thief (read as: another thief character I love with my whole damn heart). The magic system? Unique and loaded with consequences for its use (albeit maybe a tiny bit underdeveloped and vague at times). It just had so many elements of things that I adore, and that kept me hooked to it the whole time. Plus, the main character is kind of a disaster and honestly? It was pretty refreshing to have a character who made mistakes and was out of her depth and afraid of the options before her. Not to mention lovesick, for better or for worse. Asra is far from being perfect, which I appreciated a ton, especially since she's a demigod.
The other thing I really appreciated was that this world isn't homophobic or biphobic. The tension doesn't stem from that. It stems from the fact that a whole village is dead and gone, and the blood is on Asra's hands, not to mention that she is not a killer by any stretch of the imagination. She is as peaceful as possible whenever she can be, and yet all this tragedy keeps happening around her. In most books, I think a character like her would intentionally become a killer to survive, but somehow, she didn't. She grew, but that particular core stayed largely the same, and when so many stories lately are about characters becoming hardened to the world around them in order to get by, I'm really pleased that Asra didn't do that here.
Oh, and circling back a little, I'm actually delighted with the representation of bisexuality here. By now, I think a lot of folks heard about the review that painted this as a somehow lesser depiction of bisexuality because the final couple is M/F, but that's. That's literally how bisexuality works. Asra is shown to be in love with another girl, and later, she's in love with a boy. If she was only ever in love with Ina, only ever in love with girls, she'd be a lesbian and not bi. And bi folks who are in love with someone of the opposite gender are not any less bi for it.
I may have some strong personal feelings about this tbh, but we'll move on because I get the impression most folks knew that review was a load of, pardon my French on this fine morning, shit.
Anyway, I did only give this 3.5 stars, and that's because I think Coulthurst's writing is a little...clunky, for lack of a better word. Her dialogue is hard to like sometimes (except Hal, that wonderful, thieving scamp), and usually comes across as stiff or contrived. And while she certainly moves the plot along with a number of subplots in the book that lead to something greater, the amount of time she spends on each subplot feels out of balance, so we learn more about a set of characters we really never see again, and about characters who had the potential to drastically change the outcome of the story. Additionally, I thought Ina was going to be a much more important antagonist than she was. I loved what I saw of her, but I don't think I saw enough of her at the right times to enjoy the ways she helped shape the plot.
Overall, I had a good time reading Inkmistress, and I'll happily spend a good three or four hours in Coulthurst's world when the OFaS sequel or other related books come out. It's fun, it's a great break from reality (which doesn't have nearly enough dragons), and even if bits of it result in a less than well-oiled machine, I'm still in a good mood when I'm done. And that's good in a book. That's so good.
It took me a while to get into this story - it didn't help that I didn't like the romantic interest at the start of the book but as it progressed I liked it more and more. I got really involved in the storyline and found I really liked it around two thirds in when the action picked up a little more. Overall it was an enjoyable read with just a few niggles here and there.
I gave this book a 3.75 stars.
I gave this book a 3.75 stars.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Trigger warnings: self harm, emotional manipulation, claustrophobia, agoraphobia (? Or a form of it I'm not sure. I googled and it seemed to match up...), physical abuse and torture, mmm that's it I think.
So I knew this was a 5 star book two chapters in because the ending that I had predicted literally happened at the end of the second chapter. I THOUGHT I knew what was going to happen. And I was right. But then after that I had no fucking clue where it was going which is absolutely the best. I feel like I've started to get to a point in reading where I can recognise and predict tropes and that's just a buzzkill. This book killed the buzzkill.
I have also never read a book where people are just so casually gay. It was glorious. I've read books with queer protags and love interests and the occasional LGBTQ+ person in the background. Here we had a random woman with a wife and the ancient tale of two men in love and oh there go another two bisexual people and oh wait look she's now in love with a woman how absolutely ordinary etc etc. The only book that comes close is Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli although so much of that served a purpose. Like the diversity there had intention and I appreciated that because it served to validate intersectional existence. Inkmistress' diversity seemed very real and casual. And that is a different kind of amazing.
Bless Audrey Coulthurst I was screaming from chapter three till the end.
So I knew this was a 5 star book two chapters in because the ending that I had predicted literally happened at the end of the second chapter. I THOUGHT I knew what was going to happen. And I was right. But then after that I had no fucking clue where it was going which is absolutely the best. I feel like I've started to get to a point in reading where I can recognise and predict tropes and that's just a buzzkill. This book killed the buzzkill.
I have also never read a book where people are just so casually gay. It was glorious. I've read books with queer protags and love interests and the occasional LGBTQ+ person in the background. Here we had a random woman with a wife and the ancient tale of two men in love and oh there go another two bisexual people and oh wait look she's now in love with a woman how absolutely ordinary etc etc. The only book that comes close is Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli although so much of that served a purpose. Like the diversity there had intention and I appreciated that because it served to validate intersectional existence. Inkmistress' diversity seemed very real and casual. And that is a different kind of amazing.
Bless Audrey Coulthurst I was screaming from chapter three till the end.
As historical context for Of Fire and Stars, I appreciated this book, but it wasn't what I wanted it to be. Probably more my fault for the expectation than any shortcomings of the writing. I likes the beginning, and thr end gave me some closure and set up the world for the next book, but I wasn't a huge fan of most of the middle. I liked some of the characters, I was just a bit disappointed in the direction of some of their storylines. I'm glad I read it, but I don't see myself re-reading.