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3.1 AVERAGE
3.1 AVERAGE
This is another of those books where I expected to be blown away and ended up with just "yeah, it's nice". We've got a secret society of badass women who gain magical power by reading a sacred book, fight against a misogynistic tyrant, rescue women and children taken by slavers ... sounds like exactly my style. But while actually reading it, I found that the most interesting parts of the plot were overshadowed by the romance and it took me two weeks to read because my interest wasn't really grabbed.
Definitely missing something, especially in the main character and romance. But despite the shortcomings I'll be willing to try the sequel.
Originally posted at Read Sleep Repeat
I’m not gonna sugar coat it, The Bloodprint was a huge disappointment. Starting the novel was like walking into a movie halfway in progress, you’re thrown into the action without any idea what is happening or why it’s happening, and it pretty much continues that way throughout the entire length of the novel. Literally every chapter left me with more questions about the world and the plot with zero answers coming from the rest of the novel.
There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which is fine, except only a very few get any kind of development at all and even then it’s only surface. There was so much potential for great female friendships but the mediocre characterization ruined it. Often the author tried to pull emotion for the characters out of the reader, but it was heavy handed (especially in the final chapter) and there wasn’t enough character development to make me care about what was happening to them.
It also bothered me that only one character in a story with a middle eastern setting and touting diversity was actually black and her skin color was constantly mentioned and exoticized as if it was her only defining characteristic. The romance was also problematic. They have no chemistry and a past history that is anything but romantic. Plus all the main character can ever seem to say about the love interest is how attractive he is which is really not a great basis for the epic and tortured love story they author seemed to think she was creating.
The plot was…chaotic is the best (okay, nicest) word I can think of. Most of the plot of this book just happens and you’re never quite sure why because very little explanation is given about the catalysts and motivation for the events. You know there is a group of men determined to enslave women, and a group of women with magic who are the only chance of stopping them, but the magic system doesn’t get a lot of attention, nor really does this group of women. I did enjoy most of the action sequences but it also felt like a lot of those fights were too easily won.
The writing style was pleasant enough, although often repetitive and unnecessarily descriptive in parts. And honestly, I probably could have forgiven most of the issues I had with the book, bumped it up a star and given the sequel a shot if not for the rage inducing ending of the novel. I don’t care who you are, YOU DO NOT END A BOOK LIKE THAT.
I’m not gonna sugar coat it, The Bloodprint was a huge disappointment. Starting the novel was like walking into a movie halfway in progress, you’re thrown into the action without any idea what is happening or why it’s happening, and it pretty much continues that way throughout the entire length of the novel. Literally every chapter left me with more questions about the world and the plot with zero answers coming from the rest of the novel.
There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which is fine, except only a very few get any kind of development at all and even then it’s only surface. There was so much potential for great female friendships but the mediocre characterization ruined it. Often the author tried to pull emotion for the characters out of the reader, but it was heavy handed (especially in the final chapter) and there wasn’t enough character development to make me care about what was happening to them.
It also bothered me that only one character in a story with a middle eastern setting and touting diversity was actually black and her skin color was constantly mentioned and exoticized as if it was her only defining characteristic. The romance was also problematic. They have no chemistry and a past history that is anything but romantic. Plus all the main character can ever seem to say about the love interest is how attractive he is which is really not a great basis for the epic and tortured love story they author seemed to think she was creating.
The plot was…chaotic is the best (okay, nicest) word I can think of. Most of the plot of this book just happens and you’re never quite sure why because very little explanation is given about the catalysts and motivation for the events. You know there is a group of men determined to enslave women, and a group of women with magic who are the only chance of stopping them, but the magic system doesn’t get a lot of attention, nor really does this group of women. I did enjoy most of the action sequences but it also felt like a lot of those fights were too easily won.
The writing style was pleasant enough, although often repetitive and unnecessarily descriptive in parts. And honestly, I probably could have forgiven most of the issues I had with the book, bumped it up a star and given the sequel a shot if not for the rage inducing ending of the novel. I don’t care who you are, YOU DO NOT END A BOOK LIKE THAT.
No. Don’t write me a book railing against the injustice of an evil entity perpetuating ignorance and fear, wrapped in a shroud of toxic masculinity, with kickass brilliant women as the heroes - and then weigh it down with the same misogynistic bullshit it’s meant to be an antidote to. Just don’t.
This book is all over the place in terms of pacing and plot, with randomly inserted POVs disrupting what, I suppose, is meant to be narrative flow. It leaps through time when it wants and slows down to tediously describe every creak of the saddles as they ride with no apparent rhyme or reason, it spends loads of time lecturing pedantically about how this is war and there will be hardship and then characters throw tantrums every time any of the “good guys” dies. I could sort of understand the MC pulling that, considering the heaps of recriminations dumped on the MC’s head by everyone including herself, but peripheral characters that we meet for a chapter or two throw these tantrums at about the same length in the text.
The super sketchy dude that the MC dislikes on sight makes a couple of gross insinuations that she recoils from, then he leeringly suggests that she doesn’t hate him she just wants to bang him, and suddenly she’s like, “wait do I hate him or ... maybe I could want to bang him?” which is all the eye roll because the foreshadowing requiring her to hate him is bashing the reader in the face with a hammer and this woman who has sworn a vow of chastity already has a problematic love interest established. Besides, how else could he fall far enough to need the redemption of book two? All this is framed as deep layers of intrigue that she’s just too naive to understand - which is, frankly, insulting to both Arian and the reader.
I don’t understand the role of Danya at all - is he there to try and force her to question her vows, ignore her quest, and slut shame her for making friends with the people he tells her to get chummy with? Cuz that seems to be his bag. Why is it so threatening to him that she wants to find her sister and serve her people?
A: “These are the things I’ve sworn myself to and I intend to complete them.”
D: “But what about me and how much I want to fuck you? Isn’t that more important than these minor matters? How dare you betray me by not abandoning everything you stand for so I can bust a nut already?”
A: suitably shamed and guilty: “Sorry, babe, I’m just so confused about what’s the right choice here! Maybe we should just give up, let the world burn in this dumpster fire, and bang.”
WTF???
The cliffhanger ending is so predictable it hurts and if I hadn’t been reading this for a challenge I’d have scrapped it at 30%.
This book is all over the place in terms of pacing and plot, with randomly inserted POVs disrupting what, I suppose, is meant to be narrative flow. It leaps through time when it wants and slows down to tediously describe every creak of the saddles as they ride with no apparent rhyme or reason, it spends loads of time lecturing pedantically about how this is war and there will be hardship and then characters throw tantrums every time any of the “good guys” dies. I could sort of understand the MC pulling that, considering the heaps of recriminations dumped on the MC’s head by everyone including herself, but peripheral characters that we meet for a chapter or two throw these tantrums at about the same length in the text.
The super sketchy dude that the MC dislikes on sight makes a couple of gross insinuations that she recoils from, then he leeringly suggests that she doesn’t hate him she just wants to bang him, and suddenly she’s like, “wait do I hate him or ... maybe I could want to bang him?” which is all the eye roll because the foreshadowing requiring her to hate him is bashing the reader in the face with a hammer and this woman who has sworn a vow of chastity already has a problematic love interest established. Besides, how else could he fall far enough to need the redemption of book two? All this is framed as deep layers of intrigue that she’s just too naive to understand - which is, frankly, insulting to both Arian and the reader.
I don’t understand the role of Danya at all - is he there to try and force her to question her vows, ignore her quest, and slut shame her for making friends with the people he tells her to get chummy with? Cuz that seems to be his bag. Why is it so threatening to him that she wants to find her sister and serve her people?
A: “These are the things I’ve sworn myself to and I intend to complete them.”
D: “But what about me and how much I want to fuck you? Isn’t that more important than these minor matters? How dare you betray me by not abandoning everything you stand for so I can bust a nut already?”
A: suitably shamed and guilty: “Sorry, babe, I’m just so confused about what’s the right choice here! Maybe we should just give up, let the world burn in this dumpster fire, and bang.”
WTF???
The cliffhanger ending is so predictable it hurts and if I hadn’t been reading this for a challenge I’d have scrapped it at 30%.
Note: I received a review copy of The Bloodprint from the publisher. This has not impacted the content of my review.
Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.
I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.
The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.
I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.
Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.
I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.
The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.
I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.
Book 10 completed for #RamadanReadathon
daniyar i am once again asking for your hand in marriage pls
daniyar i am once again asking for your hand in marriage pls