A review by melissafelicia
Voyage of the Damned by Frances White

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I read this for a book club with my friends and I can't wait to discuss it with them, because I have a lot of opinions about it.

Let's start with the things I liked about it.

I enjoyed the knives out/glass onion vibes, I'm loving the revival of the whodunit genre in general, honestly. And this plot was very well thought-out, I could not have predicted this conclusion and there were many twists in the story, especially near the end, that were really well done. I really liked the story, especially the last few chapters.

I also thought the worldbuilding was interesting, with the provinces connected to animals and the wall against monsters from outside. The combination of the fantasy and the mystery genres was pretty cool.

However, there were also multiple things that bothered me. Firstly, there was a LOT of information in a very short time in the beginning. I literally had to take notes and look up fanart to keep track of the characters. Secondly, the main character was hard to relate to and for two thirds of the story, I did not like him at all. He was quite rude and impulsive and sometimes even childish, which grew annoying after a while. Especially when he was joking in serious situations, it annoyed me to the point of rolling my eyes. It got better in the end, luckily.

Thirdly, the writing style was not great, a bit too simple at times. Almost all sentences were very short, making it so that the sentences didn't really flow. It took a while for me to get used to it, especially because I was reading this book at the same time as Empire of the Damned, which has beautiful prose, so each time I switched back to this book, it stood out to me in a negative way.

And lastly, I thought it was interesting that the main character is plus size and eats sweets as a coping mechanism, but then I really hated that his size and his eating to cope were treated as something funny/to be made fun of. Even the 'good' characters that are supposed to be his friends/allies make fun of his eating and size and it is never addressed in the book as problematic or bad. That kind of sucks.

Final side note: I thought it was funny that one of the characters had the same last name as me, especially when the main character was scolding him, that sounded funny.