Scan barcode
A review by whiteraven191
Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
1.0
I so so wanted to like this. But it's just...not very good. For one thing, this is marked as adult (and priced as such) but it very much reads YA. Most of these characters are in their 20s but they don't feel that much more mature than the 14-year-old. The main character's internal narration in particular can be gratingly juvenile. I think the worst example is when someone's been killed and another character is disguising himself as the victim. Dee sees him stripping the clothes off the body and makes a joke about not wanting a threesome. While they stand over the still-warm body Dee's boyfriend just killed. Who had been trying to kill Dee right before that. Also, a threesome in that situation would be necrophilia, but hurr durr someone is having their clothes removed so we need to throw in a sex joke I guess.
The other glaring problem is the world-building. This is a murder mystery, but the lynchpin of the mystery is the magic system. And the magic system is a very soft magic system. Each of the characters has a unique magic power, but there don't seem to be any rules for how powerful those Blessings are or what they can be. This means that the reader can't solve the murder mystery on their own because we don't have all the pieces. Funnily enough, neither does the protagonist. He just kind of stumbles around blindly talking about how he wants to solve the murders but doesn't actually manage to save anyone. He has to be told what's happening.
That's not the only problem with the world-building. The kingdom is split into 12 regions that each have their own gimmick. This means we have a ton of characters to keep track of so they all end up with one personality trait and don't ever show more depth than that. The regions themselves also don't make sense. Most of them flow naturally into each other on the map, but the Siberia region is right next to the Texas region with no geographical barriers or anything to explain the wildly different biomes. It's like the author wanted to write someone with a stereotypical Russian accent so she just crowbarred a Siberia into the map with no care for logic.
The other glaring problem is the world-building. This is a murder mystery, but the lynchpin of the mystery is the magic system. And the magic system is a very soft magic system. Each of the characters has a unique magic power, but there don't seem to be any rules for how powerful those Blessings are or what they can be. This means that the reader can't solve the murder mystery on their own because we don't have all the pieces. Funnily enough, neither does the protagonist. He just kind of stumbles around blindly talking about how he wants to solve the murders but doesn't actually manage to save anyone. He has to be told what's happening.
That's not the only problem with the world-building. The kingdom is split into 12 regions that each have their own gimmick. This means we have a ton of characters to keep track of so they all end up with one personality trait and don't ever show more depth than that. The regions themselves also don't make sense. Most of them flow naturally into each other on the map, but the Siberia region is right next to the Texas region with no geographical barriers or anything to explain the wildly different biomes. It's like the author wanted to write someone with a stereotypical Russian accent so she just crowbarred a Siberia into the map with no care for logic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death