breadbin 's review for:

The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

2.5

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This was hard to stay engaged with. There's pretty much nothing going on until the 3rd act when we finally get given an actual antagonist. Before then it's all casual bullying, lessons in etiquette, and empassioned speeches about cultivating herbs or something. It's not overly thrilling stuff. It also falls head first into the proper-noun soup that fantasy so often becomes, and I'm drowning in it due to my inability to tell the difference between the made-up names of characters, and the made up names of places, and the historical figures, and the magical flowers, and all the creatures, and important ceremonial rituals, and the political parties, and the made-up tiers within the made-up social hierachy, and a million other things that all need names and I don't think i need to remember all of them but then the author sticks a capital letter, unprompted, at the start of a fake word and I can't remember whether, the last time this word came up, it was a job title or a type of kitchen utensil and then there's some dialogue that ends with "said the kitchen utensil" and now I have to go back and put everything into context because that was a whole-ass woman the entire time?

Anyway, ultimately this is an origin story for a character I assume is going to do stuff in the rest of the trilogy and (despite not reading the rest) I am pretty convinced this should've been the 2nd book, written as a prequel. Way too much text devoted to establishing the social and magical rules in this fantasy land and if I already cared about the characters coming into it, I'd have probably managed to stay way more engaged.