A review by minervacerridwen
Our Bloody Pearl by D.N. Bryn

adventurous dark relaxing fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

At the start of the book I'd have given Our Bloody Pearl 4 stars, but in the second half only 2 - though I did like the very end. I think I didn't quite have the right expectations for this story after seeing several people say that this was a comfort read for them; it turned out to contain a lot more persistent violence and torture than I expected from that description. However, let's start with the things I loved: the story pulled me in right from the start, and I immediately liked the main character and the way the "foreign" siren logic was presented in first-person pov. The other characters were also likeable and I felt we got to know them very quickly, which helped to connect to the story right away. The first half of the book was very easy to read and the fast pace kept me intrigued. And of course there's a lot of queer representation: the sirens having different views on gender than humans, as well as ace, trans, polyam, and F/F representation among the humans. I discovered the book through GreatAce.Club, so that was awesome!

But somewhere about halfway, there was an event in the story that made me like the main character less.
Namely, Perle makes the selfish decision of returning to the cove with the humans very soon after another siren, Storm, hurt Dejean. I'm not a siren and yet I realised that surely Storm would still be there, but Perle was apparently happy to risk the lives of their human 'pod'. This really bothered me because it could so easily have been avoided!

From that point on, we were thrown from one action scene to the next fight and yet another threat, and perhaps it was because it took me a long while to find time to read again, but it no longer felt to me like the intriguing series of events that it had been at the start. I was happy when the end of the story was in sight. Still, the story had a proper climax, and I think it's impressive that the writer pulled that off after so many other action scenes! But all in all, I think the second half of the book simply didn't come at the right time for me to read.

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