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A review by kblincoln
Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani
4.0
This is a novella, not a really a novel. I was reading along without realizing that and got to page 135 or so and was like....wait....that's it? We meet Hitomi, a scrappy young secretly-magic wielding street person who is helping a family (with the help of famous outlaw Ghost) to escape the minions of a dude named Blackflame-- who may or may not have killed Hitomi's mother.
Then she gets captured, meets a vampire (a "fang" in this world) and then gets stuck in a cell with a soul-stealing monster (called "breather") ? There are some hijinks after that including Hitomi meeting a possibly mentor and possibly having a possible more-than-friendship-forbidden type feeling with the breather....and then the books stops.
I like Hitomi. I like the fact that she can steal sun and that she's untried, and that this world isn't completely based on faux medieval europe-- and I'll forgive the somewhat self-conscious fantasy names like "brokensword" and "blackflame"-- but there's already so much of Hitomi's backstory crunched into too few pages at the start here. And too few actual scenes with her and the breather as she spends most of the last bit of the book with a broken memory.
I need more development of a lifestory and potential forbidden friendship before you make the main character forget it. Or, alternatively, spend a bunch of time after she forgets having her slowly unravel the mystery of herself. Instead we get the end of the book. So, as I said, while I liked Hitomi, I am not on board with this first book being so truncated.
If you don't mind an obvious cliffhanger, and if the book is still 99 cents as a Kindle read...it is worthwhile.
Then she gets captured, meets a vampire (a "fang" in this world) and then gets stuck in a cell with a soul-stealing monster (called "breather") ? There are some hijinks after that including Hitomi meeting a possibly mentor and possibly having a possible more-than-friendship-forbidden type feeling with the breather....and then the books stops.
I like Hitomi. I like the fact that she can steal sun and that she's untried, and that this world isn't completely based on faux medieval europe-- and I'll forgive the somewhat self-conscious fantasy names like "brokensword" and "blackflame"-- but there's already so much of Hitomi's backstory crunched into too few pages at the start here. And too few actual scenes with her and the breather as she spends most of the last bit of the book with a broken memory.
I need more development of a lifestory and potential forbidden friendship before you make the main character forget it. Or, alternatively, spend a bunch of time after she forgets having her slowly unravel the mystery of herself. Instead we get the end of the book. So, as I said, while I liked Hitomi, I am not on board with this first book being so truncated.
If you don't mind an obvious cliffhanger, and if the book is still 99 cents as a Kindle read...it is worthwhile.