I received an eARC of Blood and Fire from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
At first, the writing style of Blood and Fire seemed enjoyable enough.
It was witty and conversational which I found to be fun. The main character is snarky, has a habit of cussing often, and was really entertaining right off the bat. But as the story went on, it got tiring pretty quickly. It became harder and harder to force my way through the novel as it went on, reminding me much of the quality of books I’d be able to read for free on wattpad.
While this book is intended for an adult audience, if one were to take out the near-constant cussing, then Blood and Fire would read more like a middle grade book.
Other than the brief fun I had with the conversational wittiness of the narration in the first few chapters, I can’t honestly speak of other aspects of this novel that I enjoyed. On a copy-editing level, I was surprised with the amount of typos, misspellings, missing quotations, and other punctuation marks that littered the novel.
As for the developmental aspects of the novel, there were many issues.
At first, I immediately realized that the plot moved really, really quickly. I would have liked it slowed down a bit and more attention given to specific scenes (for example, the court scene at the beginning of the book). However, about 60% of the way through, when things were “starting to happen” (I put this in quotations because even though things were technically starting to happen, there was no buildup — they came out of nowhere and had relatively nothing to do with progressing the storyline in any authentic way) I actually realized that there was not really a plot to move.
There were several inconsistencies, plot holes, and unrealistic events happening with no prior buildup. The “mystery” wasn’t a mystery at all, there was no tension or foreboding. Usually, when solving mysteries, there is a process in which one hunts for answers, and gets closer, step by step, meanwhile being thwarted occasionally by those trying to stop answers from being found.
However, the novel seemed to skip that process, with the characters being chased and attacked for no reason (even when they haven’t started looking for answers, when they are nowhere near close to finding any) and then running away. The magic also made absolutely no sense, characters able to use it randomly for numerous things, with no rules or boundaries. Magic without rules or boundaries seems a little too easy for me, and therefore extremely uninteresting.
And lastly, the characters, just like the plot, were extremely lacking. There was no characterization of the main character, nor the several other characters throughout the story. I didn’t learn anything beyond surface level with them, and because of this, I didn’t care what happened to them.
I really wanted to like this novel, but unfortunately it just wasn’t for me.