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A review by laelyn
Silk Fire by Zabé Ellor
1.0
I... I honestly don't know what to even write in this review. Let me start with this: I requested the arc of "Silk Fire" because for many, this seemed to be one of the most anticipated fantasy reads this year. The premise is a great one: fantasy mixed with sci-fi, a male courtesan as the protagonist, a polyam relationship, lots of court intrigue. Sounds amazing? Absolutely!
Then I started reading this book and had to stop for a moment and google if maybe I was thinking about a different book, because surely this can't be that highly anticipated work by an author everyone seemed to love. I hadn't even started chapter one by then, I was just reading that horrifying pronunciation guide listing all these fantasy names that are genuinely so ridiculous and made no sense at all (what's with the misplaced accents all over???), it reads like a very young fantasy fan making up some names for their first wattpad fiction attempt.
Quite frankly, most of the book reads like that. To be entirely honest: I did not manage to read the entire book. The rest I just skimmed, wondering if maybe this could get any better and because I really really don't like dnf-ing arcs. But I just.... I just couldn't do it. I usually start my reviews of books I didn't enjoy with the positives, because there are always some positives, right? Well, I'm so sorry to say but the positives of this book are these: It has a cool, interesting premise, and there are some ideas that could be, theoretically, kind of cool, if this were a different book.
I'm not going to write an overtly long review because I don't want to rant too much, but this book is borderline catastrophic. The writing is weak and convoluted, the world-building is a complete nonsensical mess that is mostly served as paragraphs of info dumping or thrown into the chapters with absolutely no contextual explanations whatsoever (what's with the quotes at the beginning of every chapter just vomiting some fantasy words with no context? what am I, as a reader, supposed to do with this?). There is SO much going on - dinosaurs and dragons and direwolves and gods and I don't even know, my head was about to explode trying to make sense of it all. There is no coherence to how this world is built, it's like the author took all these ideas and concepts and threw them at a wall hoping any of them would stick. It's absolutely wild.
Then there is the overabundance of meme-y writing ("we have fucking at home", are you kidding me??) and modern vocabulary that isn't explained within the context of this world ("slut-shaming", "queer", and so on). The matriarchal society seems to be little more than pure caricature, with no thought or research put into how matriarchal societies work - it's stylized patriarchy but with women and it only exists to show how all these women mistreat our protagonist. It is incredibly lazily done and makes absolutely no sense. Honestly, I found it rather misogynist, though I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt here. I'm just not sure if he knows what patriarchy really is and how it works and why it works that way, and thus why matriarchies work very differently. Ah well.
The characters are... I honestly don't know. Koré could have been so interesting, but he is flat and inconsistent. His love interests are not even fully fleshed out characters. The plot is... there I guess? It's all over the place, nothing makes sense, so many things happen in a span of like, five pages (the first chapter - what the hell was that??) and even moreso, there was no depth or consequence to any of the things happening. At one point, Koré turns into a dragon (mythical beings that haven't been seen for ages) in front of one of his love interests and her reaction is basically "okay then, ah well, let's get moving", as if this is just the most normal thing to happen to her. Oh, and this godsent dragon power? Koré gets it while he is being railed from behind by some customer in an archive, after half of that archive crumbled around them, which doesn't seem to bother anyone. Choices have been made. Generally, this reads like the author had all these plot points and events in his mind and it all made sense in his head, but he didn't manage to actually put them down on paper in a coherent way that readers who haven't developed the ability of mindreading just yet can understand.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg, and I cannot review the second half of the book though I doubt it gets any better. This is an absolute disaster of a book, as sorry as I am to say this. It needs a lot more editing and rewriting for this to become even just a coherent novel. As it is, it's nonsensical, poorly researched, void of any thought out concepts or interesting characters. I have no idea what was even going on. But there sure are dinosaurs.
Then I started reading this book and had to stop for a moment and google if maybe I was thinking about a different book, because surely this can't be that highly anticipated work by an author everyone seemed to love. I hadn't even started chapter one by then, I was just reading that horrifying pronunciation guide listing all these fantasy names that are genuinely so ridiculous and made no sense at all (what's with the misplaced accents all over???), it reads like a very young fantasy fan making up some names for their first wattpad fiction attempt.
Quite frankly, most of the book reads like that. To be entirely honest: I did not manage to read the entire book. The rest I just skimmed, wondering if maybe this could get any better and because I really really don't like dnf-ing arcs. But I just.... I just couldn't do it. I usually start my reviews of books I didn't enjoy with the positives, because there are always some positives, right? Well, I'm so sorry to say but the positives of this book are these: It has a cool, interesting premise, and there are some ideas that could be, theoretically, kind of cool, if this were a different book.
I'm not going to write an overtly long review because I don't want to rant too much, but this book is borderline catastrophic. The writing is weak and convoluted, the world-building is a complete nonsensical mess that is mostly served as paragraphs of info dumping or thrown into the chapters with absolutely no contextual explanations whatsoever (what's with the quotes at the beginning of every chapter just vomiting some fantasy words with no context? what am I, as a reader, supposed to do with this?). There is SO much going on - dinosaurs and dragons and direwolves and gods and I don't even know, my head was about to explode trying to make sense of it all. There is no coherence to how this world is built, it's like the author took all these ideas and concepts and threw them at a wall hoping any of them would stick. It's absolutely wild.
Then there is the overabundance of meme-y writing ("we have fucking at home", are you kidding me??) and modern vocabulary that isn't explained within the context of this world ("slut-shaming", "queer", and so on). The matriarchal society seems to be little more than pure caricature, with no thought or research put into how matriarchal societies work - it's stylized patriarchy but with women and it only exists to show how all these women mistreat our protagonist. It is incredibly lazily done and makes absolutely no sense. Honestly, I found it rather misogynist, though I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt here. I'm just not sure if he knows what patriarchy really is and how it works and why it works that way, and thus why matriarchies work very differently. Ah well.
The characters are... I honestly don't know. Koré could have been so interesting, but he is flat and inconsistent. His love interests are not even fully fleshed out characters. The plot is... there I guess? It's all over the place, nothing makes sense, so many things happen in a span of like, five pages (the first chapter - what the hell was that??) and even moreso, there was no depth or consequence to any of the things happening. At one point, Koré turns into a dragon (mythical beings that haven't been seen for ages) in front of one of his love interests and her reaction is basically "okay then, ah well, let's get moving", as if this is just the most normal thing to happen to her. Oh, and this godsent dragon power? Koré gets it while he is being railed from behind by some customer in an archive, after half of that archive crumbled around them, which doesn't seem to bother anyone. Choices have been made. Generally, this reads like the author had all these plot points and events in his mind and it all made sense in his head, but he didn't manage to actually put them down on paper in a coherent way that readers who haven't developed the ability of mindreading just yet can understand.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg, and I cannot review the second half of the book though I doubt it gets any better. This is an absolute disaster of a book, as sorry as I am to say this. It needs a lot more editing and rewriting for this to become even just a coherent novel. As it is, it's nonsensical, poorly researched, void of any thought out concepts or interesting characters. I have no idea what was even going on. But there sure are dinosaurs.