kevinscorner 's review for:

Grievar's Blood by Alexander Darwin

4.0

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Grievar’s Blood is the second book in the science fiction series The Combat Codes Saga. Cego is now in his second year at the combat school Lyceum and must deal with the discovery of his mysterious origin and what it means for him. Solara Halberd has left the school on a covert mission of her own to retrieve her father’s body from the hands of a distant Daimyo collector. Murray is back in the Deep, looking for Cego’s youngest brother Sam. And as all this is happening, Cego’s older brother Silas the Slayer is building a rebellion to take down the Daimyo and the very system they built to control Grievars and Grunts.

This is a very disjointed book. While I did actually like each individual thread, I had hoped it would tie together somehow or have parallels, but there just wasn’t any. As it is, the book is entirely made up three separate stories that have nothing to do with each other (except for one that swaps for another halfway through making it a total of 4). And while the first book ends with all the characters together, the small time jump suddenly has them all separate. It feels like there were too many conveniences and retconning in between the two books to fit this new story. I thought that was a bit of a cheat, and it ended up not feeling natural and made me question how believable the leaps were (particularly Solara). It feels like after the first book, the author changed plans and just hamfisted this new beginning he needed for the sequel despite where things ended beforehand.

That said, the one main thing the book has got going for is it that it’s got style. The fight scenes are dynamic, cinematic, and gripping. It knows how to grab its readers with the down and dirty grit of the hand to hand combat and can even make unfamiliar techniques to me come alive. There was one especially fantastic sequence that was stunning and vividly portrayed, and it did also make me tear up emotionally. And like I’ve previously stated, I also liked the journeys of each character—Cego’s search for his own identity, Solara’s exploration of her relationship to her dead father, and Murray’s need for redemption.

Despite lacking cohesion, Grievar’s Blood had great storylines and moments that brought it to series highs.