A review by wardenred
A Ferry of Bones & Gold by Hailey Turner

adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

“The SOA isn’t the military with a multibillion-dollar budget and the ability to write off your destructive tendencies with a mere warning.”
“That’s a shame. You might want to look into changing your budget.”

This book was actively recommended to me as something that would scratch the itch left by Charlie Adhara's fantastic but sadly finite Big Bad Wolf series. I fully admit it's possible that if I picked it up for some other reason, I would be a bit less strict. Beyond the surface similarities, like being investigative urban fantasy with werewolves and m/m romance, these books really have little in common. The Soulbound 'verse, for once, is a lot more expansive and varied—and I feel like it's both this novel's strength and downfall.

On one hand, I'm extremely impressed by the rich lore the author crafted and by how all those elements—magic users, shifters, demons, gods, vampires, and more—all mattered to the plot. On the other hand, the plot often got seriously bogged down in all the worldbuilding, especially given the way the lore was introduced. There were SO MANY infodumps, OMG. It's unreal. Especially at the beginning—it felt like the story just couldn't start properly, because every page or two everything paused and there were a few paragraphs of densely worded explanations that I could barely process. Because I expected to read an exciting urban fantasy novel, not a guidebook on a made-up world. It was also so awkward and unnatural given the third person limited POV—as if the main character felt the need to suddenly just stop everything and think about a number of things that are supposed to be perfectly familiar to him. It's like if you, hypothetical future reader of this review, paused right this moment to conduct an elaborate inner monologue on what Storygraph and book reviews even are. I bet you don't feel the need to do that, do you?

This heavy-handed delivery made it hard to follow the plot in more than one way. Like, I'm still not sure if it's a plot hole that during their second meeting Marek tells Patrick something like, "You didn't say you were a mage, we thought you were just a cop." Like, come on, Marek cast an anti-eavesdropping spell when they first met? Although he did describe casting it differently than his previous spell, so maybe Marek assumed he was a witch and not a mage? How am I supposed to know that, though? Was that information contained in one of those guidebook-style detours that I glossed over because I wanted to get on with the story parts? It certainly wasn't in the story parts.

As for the romance plot, to be honest I didn't feel any strong chemistry between the leads and I felt like their mutual investment in the relationship grew too quickly. What frustrated me that given these guys' respective backstories and personalities, there was a lot of potential for me to absolutely fall for their romance, but something was constantly off. Probably the balance of the action/mystery storyline and the relationship storyline, for the most part. And again, there was plenty of potential for syncing up those plots to help them move together more smoothly! But it was completely missed in favor of infodumps and some other needless wordy moments.

I'm probably still going to continue with the series, because the setting intrigues me, and there are a lot of characters here who seem interesting. Though unfortunately few of them are anywhere near what I'd call "fully realized," possibly because there are just too many people and other individuals on these pages to give anyone proper screen time and significant chance to establish themselves. But... yeah, this wasn't the reading experience I hoped for, especially when I kept comparing this book with Charlie Adhara's far more thoughtfully crafted works.
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