Blood, Ink & Fire - Ashley Mansour
Title: Blood, Ink & Fire
Author: Ashley Mansour
Publication: December 1st, 2015
Publisher: Upturn Publishing
Summary:
Imagine a world without books…
In the future, books are a distant memory. The written word has been replaced by an ever-present stream of images known as Verity. In the controlling dominion of the United Vales of Fell, reading is obsolete and forbidden, and readers themselves do not—cannot—exist.
But where others see images in the stream, teenager Noelle Hartley sees words. She’s obsessed with what they mean, where they came from, and why they found her. Noelle’s been keeping her dangerous fixation with words a secret, but on the night before her seventeenth birthday, a rare interruption in the stream leads her to a mysterious volume linked to an underworld of rebel book lovers known as the Nine of the Rising. With the help of the Risers and the beguiling boy Ledger, Noelle discovers that the words within her are precious clues to the books of the earlier time—and as a child of their bookless age, she might be the world’s last hope of bringing them back. Blood, Ink & Fire is a gripping, evocative tale that asks, who would we be without books?
My Review:
Lou's mind stars: ✭✭✭
This is a book difficult to review. The premises were really good and promising but the whole story fell flat to me. Don't get me wrong; the writing is good – excellent, even – but that doesn't do everything. The book is very long. 464 pages that are quite easy to read at first but after a while, it get difficult. The story drags on and on. The important parts are brushed over while the parts that I felt where not important (or even unnecessary) went for pages on end. If only in those parts, there were little details that would make the story advance just a little bit I wouldn't have mind that much but here, it feels like the edit was quite poorly made. Next time, cut the boring parts and put some length and depth into the important ones. As for the characters, I had a very hard time connecting to them. Noelle, the main character, appears quite selfish and at times, so childish, I could just roll my eyes. I can understand some of her actions but in the end, when I look at the whole story, it feels like a big joke. She's supposed to be a leader? I see nothing of a leader in her. Regarding Ledger, we never get to know what/who he really is. I can grasp the concept of his character but I need more of information about him. The other characters, some are good others are just hateful. I thought I would enjoy this story for it was not the usual story we can read around here but in the end, I got angry and bored so many times during the reading process that I wonder what I really read. And this ending... surely (hopefully) we will get a sequel? Because the end as I see it right now is just a big let on. Giving it 3 stars only because of the writing and some good parts.
*book received from the author for an honest review*
