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A review by littlebopeep
Our Bloody Pearl by D.N. Bryn
4.0
To start with, I got a free copy of this book in exchange for a review. Before this I hadn't changed a word with the author, so this is no a nice, polite review for a friend - I just got really lucky! And because this is the internet, I get to be as brutal as I can with next to no consequences, so don't worry about me trying to spare the author's feelings. Thankfully, it didn't come to that. This is a good book and I highly recommend it. This is a perfect book for a bad day: it's short, can be read in one day, sweet and fun, and guaranteed to make your day a whole lot better.
To be honest, I've never been a fan of sirens or pirates. Everyone else seems to love them, but to me... meh. I still don't think I'm a siren-fan, just a Bryn-fan. Her take on sirens is thankfully quite far away from the beautiful seductress' from every vaguely Greek-ish siren story. Sirens in OBP are never precisely described, and a lot of is left to the readers' imagination. They eat organs and flesh, live in pods and swim around the ocean. This small amount information is due to the 1st person POV, which was one of my absolute favourite things in this book. The POV character is Perle, a siren, who is very much not human but still oddly relatable - by page ten I was mentally screaming "Just stuck your hand in that fresh corpse and give her a goddamn liver, you moron!", because of course I was. Bryn does an excellent job in balancing this: Perle's thoughts make it clear that she is of different species, but she's not too alien to relate to and root for. Sirens still have the basic human emotions and feelings - joy, sorrow, pain, et cetera - to make things easier for us readers, but they are often portrayed in such different ways and contexts to make them just a little bit off to stand out. Perle doesn't quite understand the human world and usually thinks little of it, and so the world itself is left quite vague and mysterious to us. I understood only from the back-cover and Bryn's blog posts that this is a steampunk-inspired world, but from the text itself it didn't get through, and I don't necessarily thing that's a bad thing. Perle, a siren who belongs to the ocean, doesn't care and doesn't need to know about how humans on land move around and what machines they use to help their lives. Perle only describes things she finds interesting or are relevant to the moment: how some people look, what kind of transport or room she's so she can plan her escape back to her home. I think only four place names were mentioned: two ships, and Dejean mentions two islands. Perle just doesn' care, and that's amazing. Of course I love good world-building just as much as anyone, and a good fantasy map makes me go crazy, but in OBP those things wouldn't make any sense - why would Perle know the names of a dozen fictional kingdoms on land? While occasionally this lack of information was a bit infuriating, as the readers only found out that the ships can fly but our curiosity isn't properly answered, in the end I really appreciated this choice and especially Bryn's faithful consistency in this.
This is a short book, with a very simple plot and a small cast of characters - I don't think more than 10 characters were named, though I didn't count. The main cast consists of four people, all with their individual personalities and voices. Someone might say "Well, of course if there's only four characters it's easy to differentiate between them, it's only four distinct people!", but... oh boy, it doesn't work that way. I know I'm not the only one who has read way too many books where it's near impossible to point out even one difference between the main cast, or even just the protagonist and the sidekick. Appearance-wise? Sure, easy peasy. Personality-wise? Ummm... no. They're just... there. Existing. While it is always very easy to do that with the main cast of the OBP, I do think that the characters - besides Perle - are a bit bland. I never got a good sense of their motivations and aspirations. There was no conflict between the main four characters: they just immediately got along and became a family (or a pod, in the world of OBP) and that was it. There was no conflict and it was a bit difficult to believe, especially as only Dejean was able to communicate with Perle with sign language in the book. I love nice and kind people, but I just didn't entirely buy it how nice and kind Dejean, Simone and Murielle were. I would've loved to see more conflict between the cast, especially as these are two completely different species and cultures.
Another thing that I wasn't really keen in terms of the main cast actually has to to with the amazing Perle themself. They're a great character, and absolutely loved reading their thoughts and snarky comments. However, Perle wasn't really an active protagonist. For example in the end, when Perle
The villain was unfortunately weak. I personally love a good villain, perhaps a bit too much, so I was dissapointed with Kian. She's horrible, and that's all there is to her. Everyone in the book talks about how evil she is, even though she only appears in a handful of pages, doing her evil deeds. Of course we see Perle's reaction every time Kian is mentioned, but otherwise she never feels like a true threat. I couldn't really believe her as a villain as we didn't really get to see all her evilness in prime, and this is something that we see way too often in fantasy: just talking about a villain doesn't make the readers hate them. We have to see them in action, and see them as three-dimensional characters with more personality than Pure Evilness. There is a brief mention of Kian's mandatory tragic backstory, which explains some of her actions, but it is really quite brief. The antagonist in OBP is much more of a plot-tool to make things happen than a well-developed character: she's the reason why Perle and Dejean meet, an aspect which they bond over, and a way to bring a little excitement to this otherwise super-fluffy and sweet book. Of course in a short book like this there even isn't enough pages to come up with a complex plot and a 50-page interlude to bring light to the antagonist's motivations, but I still felt like Kian could've been developed more as a character and a villain.
Then onto my favourite character - or, well, he was super cool at least and completely underused - Theirn! Theirn is Kian's... first-mate, I think? I'm really bad at this whole naval lingo, especially in English. He's a minor character, with only a few lines, but in my opinion perhaps the most complex character right after Perle and the one I'm looking forward to most in the next part.
OBP also has a very utopian nature to it - and I mean this in the good old-fashioned way, when people thought about the future as bright, hopeful and something to aspire to, not the unreachable dream -kinda way. As pretty much everyone who has read this great book mentions, OBP features a number of POC and LGBTQ+ characters - and they are pretty much blink-and-you-miss-it, but in the best way. In Bryn's world there is no need for different constricting boxes of sexuality, ethnicity et cetera - people are much more than that one thing, and that's how it should be. Quite often there is the infamous Token Black -character whose entire personality is about being black - cause apparently that's a thing? Same goes for LGBTQ+ characters; there's nothing more to them than for the creator to show that "hey, I support minorities too!" And yes, of course I'm an advocate for more diversity, but characters always should have more personality, history, motivations, goals, et cetera, than one part of their identity. Bryn does an excellent job at this. It took my half a book to even realize that Perle is exclusively referred with they-pronoun - it was just so natural and beautifully done, just like all references to sexuality, gender, ethnicity et cetera in this book. Massive kudos for that - hopefully our own world will someday be like Bryn's vision.
To sum up this over-long review: this is a really sweet, beautifully written feel-good book with lots of great quotes which I highlighted on my Kindle but my technological skills aren't high enough to import here, with quite a few bloody deaths and severed organs, but all in all this read just made me really happy. The plot was really simple, but OBP is definitely about it's fantastic and diverse main characters and the really cool world which still has lot to explore.
To be honest, I've never been a fan of sirens or pirates. Everyone else seems to love them, but to me... meh. I still don't think I'm a siren-fan, just a Bryn-fan. Her take on sirens is thankfully quite far away from the beautiful seductress' from every vaguely Greek-ish siren story. Sirens in OBP are never precisely described, and a lot of is left to the readers' imagination. They eat organs and flesh, live in pods and swim around the ocean. This small amount information is due to the 1st person POV, which was one of my absolute favourite things in this book. The POV character is Perle, a siren, who is very much not human but still oddly relatable - by page ten I was mentally screaming "Just stuck your hand in that fresh corpse and give her a goddamn liver, you moron!", because of course I was. Bryn does an excellent job in balancing this: Perle's thoughts make it clear that she is of different species, but she's not too alien to relate to and root for. Sirens still have the basic human emotions and feelings - joy, sorrow, pain, et cetera - to make things easier for us readers, but they are often portrayed in such different ways and contexts to make them just a little bit off to stand out. Perle doesn't quite understand the human world and usually thinks little of it, and so the world itself is left quite vague and mysterious to us. I understood only from the back-cover and Bryn's blog posts that this is a steampunk-inspired world, but from the text itself it didn't get through, and I don't necessarily thing that's a bad thing. Perle, a siren who belongs to the ocean, doesn't care and doesn't need to know about how humans on land move around and what machines they use to help their lives. Perle only describes things she finds interesting or are relevant to the moment: how some people look, what kind of transport or room she's so she can plan her escape back to her home. I think only four place names were mentioned: two ships, and Dejean mentions two islands. Perle just doesn' care, and that's amazing. Of course I love good world-building just as much as anyone, and a good fantasy map makes me go crazy, but in OBP those things wouldn't make any sense - why would Perle know the names of a dozen fictional kingdoms on land? While occasionally this lack of information was a bit infuriating, as the readers only found out that the ships can fly but our curiosity isn't properly answered, in the end I really appreciated this choice and especially Bryn's faithful consistency in this.
This is a short book, with a very simple plot and a small cast of characters - I don't think more than 10 characters were named, though I didn't count. The main cast consists of four people, all with their individual personalities and voices. Someone might say "Well, of course if there's only four characters it's easy to differentiate between them, it's only four distinct people!", but... oh boy, it doesn't work that way. I know I'm not the only one who has read way too many books where it's near impossible to point out even one difference between the main cast, or even just the protagonist and the sidekick. Appearance-wise? Sure, easy peasy. Personality-wise? Ummm... no. They're just... there. Existing. While it is always very easy to do that with the main cast of the OBP, I do think that the characters - besides Perle - are a bit bland. I never got a good sense of their motivations and aspirations. There was no conflict between the main four characters: they just immediately got along and became a family (or a pod, in the world of OBP) and that was it. There was no conflict and it was a bit difficult to believe, especially as only Dejean was able to communicate with Perle with sign language in the book. I love nice and kind people, but I just didn't entirely buy it how nice and kind Dejean, Simone and Murielle were. I would've loved to see more conflict between the cast, especially as these are two completely different species and cultures.
Another thing that I wasn't really keen in terms of the main cast actually has to to with the amazing Perle themself. They're a great character, and absolutely loved reading their thoughts and snarky comments. However, Perle wasn't really an active protagonist. For example in the end, when Perle
Spoiler
is captured by Kian, they make a very cool inner statement that they're not going to wait to be rescued again, and instead they're going to save themselves. Next paragraph? Dejean has climbed the entire ship to save Perle, even when he's injured, and is knocking on the window.The villain was unfortunately weak. I personally love a good villain, perhaps a bit too much, so I was dissapointed with Kian. She's horrible, and that's all there is to her. Everyone in the book talks about how evil she is, even though she only appears in a handful of pages, doing her evil deeds. Of course we see Perle's reaction every time Kian is mentioned, but otherwise she never feels like a true threat. I couldn't really believe her as a villain as we didn't really get to see all her evilness in prime, and this is something that we see way too often in fantasy: just talking about a villain doesn't make the readers hate them. We have to see them in action, and see them as three-dimensional characters with more personality than Pure Evilness. There is a brief mention of Kian's mandatory tragic backstory, which explains some of her actions, but it is really quite brief. The antagonist in OBP is much more of a plot-tool to make things happen than a well-developed character: she's the reason why Perle and Dejean meet, an aspect which they bond over, and a way to bring a little excitement to this otherwise super-fluffy and sweet book. Of course in a short book like this there even isn't enough pages to come up with a complex plot and a 50-page interlude to bring light to the antagonist's motivations, but I still felt like Kian could've been developed more as a character and a villain.
Then onto my favourite character - or, well, he was super cool at least and completely underused - Theirn! Theirn is Kian's... first-mate, I think? I'm really bad at this whole naval lingo, especially in English. He's a minor character, with only a few lines, but in my opinion perhaps the most complex character right after Perle and the one I'm looking forward to most in the next part.
Spoiler
Theirn works for Kian and suffers her abuse obediently and loyally. However, Perle also personally knows that he is capable of compassion and kindness, and I loved how in the end he decides to save his own hide to help a siren he previously helped to torture for his beloved captain. I hope that in the next part we will learn more about him and his motivation: why he always stood by his captain even though he didn't agree with her; why he became a pirate in the first place; why he could dedicate his life to help Kian hunt and kill sirens while his interactions with Perle and Abyss that he personally had nothing against sirens, even seemed fascinated by them. I just can't wait to see more of him!OBP also has a very utopian nature to it - and I mean this in the good old-fashioned way, when people thought about the future as bright, hopeful and something to aspire to, not the unreachable dream -kinda way. As pretty much everyone who has read this great book mentions, OBP features a number of POC and LGBTQ+ characters - and they are pretty much blink-and-you-miss-it, but in the best way. In Bryn's world there is no need for different constricting boxes of sexuality, ethnicity et cetera - people are much more than that one thing, and that's how it should be. Quite often there is the infamous Token Black -character whose entire personality is about being black - cause apparently that's a thing? Same goes for LGBTQ+ characters; there's nothing more to them than for the creator to show that "hey, I support minorities too!" And yes, of course I'm an advocate for more diversity, but characters always should have more personality, history, motivations, goals, et cetera, than one part of their identity. Bryn does an excellent job at this. It took my half a book to even realize that Perle is exclusively referred with they-pronoun - it was just so natural and beautifully done, just like all references to sexuality, gender, ethnicity et cetera in this book. Massive kudos for that - hopefully our own world will someday be like Bryn's vision.
Spoiler
On the same note, I also loved the sublety in handling miscommunications between cultures and languages. It is very relevant to our own world, a point which was no doubt intentional, and I loved how none of the messages in this book were punched right into your noses. OBP simply contrasted and compared our real-life issues to her world, and it was very well and subtly done.To sum up this over-long review: this is a really sweet, beautifully written feel-good book with lots of great quotes which I highlighted on my Kindle but my technological skills aren't high enough to import here, with quite a few bloody deaths and severed organs, but all in all this read just made me really happy. The plot was really simple, but OBP is definitely about it's fantastic and diverse main characters and the really cool world which still has lot to explore.