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brizzolara 's review for:
Blood Song
by Anthony Ryan
This is a challenging and frustrating book to review. The first half or so is a compelling, quick reading piece that propels the story and its main character forward. It's worth four stars. But the second half really struggles for a variety of reasons.
The comparison has been made to Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles. Certainly shades of that can be seen in the first half of the book, but the comparison only serves to highlight the shortcomings of the book (even the best part of the book). Where the characters in Rothfuss's work are clear and vibrant -- almost every character memorable and distinct -- the characters in this book blend together, often acting more for service of the plot than as distinct entities.
If the first half enjoyably aspires more to Rothfuss without quite getting there, the second half aspires more to Abercrombie and falls well short. The protagonist goes from being a skilled, inquisitive individual to one who seems numb to everything, sleep walking through the pages.
The latter part of the book isn't helped by jumps in time and location that are only partially explained, with the intervening period vaguely hinted at. Even chapter headings with a location and a time ("4 years later") would have been appreciated. It's often explained in the chapter ("It had been 4 years since..."), but that means I was frequently grasping for context until I received it, distracting from whatever was actually happening.
Without revealing anything, the final portion of the book was more satisfying, but by then the damage had been done.
Like Name of the Wind, this book takes place vaguely as a retelling of a life's story, though it's told in third person and we're led to believe that the story we're getting and the story being related in the interludes are quite different. These chapters largely work to provide a structure for the story. As an aside, I should say it's really quite annoying to read an entire chapter's worth of text in italics. Just tell us it's the interlude, I promise I'll understand.
Between the four star first half, two star second portion and decent ending chapters, this gets three stars, but it's a frustrated three: it showed a lot of promise that wasn't carried through.
The comparison has been made to Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles. Certainly shades of that can be seen in the first half of the book, but the comparison only serves to highlight the shortcomings of the book (even the best part of the book). Where the characters in Rothfuss's work are clear and vibrant -- almost every character memorable and distinct -- the characters in this book blend together, often acting more for service of the plot than as distinct entities.
If the first half enjoyably aspires more to Rothfuss without quite getting there, the second half aspires more to Abercrombie and falls well short. The protagonist goes from being a skilled, inquisitive individual to one who seems numb to everything, sleep walking through the pages.
The latter part of the book isn't helped by jumps in time and location that are only partially explained, with the intervening period vaguely hinted at. Even chapter headings with a location and a time ("4 years later") would have been appreciated. It's often explained in the chapter ("It had been 4 years since..."), but that means I was frequently grasping for context until I received it, distracting from whatever was actually happening.
Without revealing anything, the final portion of the book was more satisfying, but by then the damage had been done.
Like Name of the Wind, this book takes place vaguely as a retelling of a life's story, though it's told in third person and we're led to believe that the story we're getting and the story being related in the interludes are quite different. These chapters largely work to provide a structure for the story. As an aside, I should say it's really quite annoying to read an entire chapter's worth of text in italics. Just tell us it's the interlude, I promise I'll understand.
Between the four star first half, two star second portion and decent ending chapters, this gets three stars, but it's a frustrated three: it showed a lot of promise that wasn't carried through.