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olive2read's review against another edition
1.0
No. Don’t write me a book railing against the injustice of an evil entity perpetuating ignorance and fear, wrapped in a shroud of toxic masculinity, with kickass brilliant women as the heroes - and then weigh it down with the same misogynistic bullshit it’s meant to be an antidote to. Just don’t.
This book is all over the place in terms of pacing and plot, with randomly inserted POVs disrupting what, I suppose, is meant to be narrative flow. It leaps through time when it wants and slows down to tediously describe every creak of the saddles as they ride with no apparent rhyme or reason, it spends loads of time lecturing pedantically about how this is war and there will be hardship and then characters throw tantrums every time any of the “good guys” dies. I could sort of understand the MC pulling that, considering the heaps of recriminations dumped on the MC’s head by everyone including herself, but peripheral characters that we meet for a chapter or two throw these tantrums at about the same length in the text.
The super sketchy dude that the MC dislikes on sight makes a couple of gross insinuations that she recoils from, then he leeringly suggests that she doesn’t hate him she just wants to bang him, and suddenly she’s like, “wait do I hate him or ... maybe I could want to bang him?” which is all the eye roll because the foreshadowing requiring her to hate him is bashing the reader in the face with a hammer and this woman who has sworn a vow of chastity already has a problematic love interest established. Besides, how else could he fall far enough to need the redemption of book two? All this is framed as deep layers of intrigue that she’s just too naive to understand - which is, frankly, insulting to both Arian and the reader.
I don’t understand the role of Danya at all - is he there to try and force her to question her vows, ignore her quest, and slut shame her for making friends with the people he tells her to get chummy with? Cuz that seems to be his bag. Why is it so threatening to him that she wants to find her sister and serve her people?
A: “These are the things I’ve sworn myself to and I intend to complete them.”
D: “But what about me and how much I want to fuck you? Isn’t that more important than these minor matters? How dare you betray me by not abandoning everything you stand for so I can bust a nut already?”
A: suitably shamed and guilty: “Sorry, babe, I’m just so confused about what’s the right choice here! Maybe we should just give up, let the world burn in this dumpster fire, and bang.”
WTF???
The cliffhanger ending is so predictable it hurts and if I hadn’t been reading this for a challenge I’d have scrapped it at 30%.
This book is all over the place in terms of pacing and plot, with randomly inserted POVs disrupting what, I suppose, is meant to be narrative flow. It leaps through time when it wants and slows down to tediously describe every creak of the saddles as they ride with no apparent rhyme or reason, it spends loads of time lecturing pedantically about how this is war and there will be hardship and then characters throw tantrums every time any of the “good guys” dies. I could sort of understand the MC pulling that, considering the heaps of recriminations dumped on the MC’s head by everyone including herself, but peripheral characters that we meet for a chapter or two throw these tantrums at about the same length in the text.
The super sketchy dude that the MC dislikes on sight makes a couple of gross insinuations that she recoils from, then he leeringly suggests that she doesn’t hate him she just wants to bang him, and suddenly she’s like, “wait do I hate him or ... maybe I could want to bang him?” which is all the eye roll because the foreshadowing requiring her to hate him is bashing the reader in the face with a hammer and this woman who has sworn a vow of chastity already has a problematic love interest established. Besides, how else could he fall far enough to need the redemption of book two? All this is framed as deep layers of intrigue that she’s just too naive to understand - which is, frankly, insulting to both Arian and the reader.
I don’t understand the role of Danya at all - is he there to try and force her to question her vows, ignore her quest, and slut shame her for making friends with the people he tells her to get chummy with? Cuz that seems to be his bag. Why is it so threatening to him that she wants to find her sister and serve her people?
A: “These are the things I’ve sworn myself to and I intend to complete them.”
D: “But what about me and how much I want to fuck you? Isn’t that more important than these minor matters? How dare you betray me by not abandoning everything you stand for so I can bust a nut already?”
A: suitably shamed and guilty: “Sorry, babe, I’m just so confused about what’s the right choice here! Maybe we should just give up, let the world burn in this dumpster fire, and bang.”
WTF???
The cliffhanger ending is so predictable it hurts and if I hadn’t been reading this for a challenge I’d have scrapped it at 30%.
readingtheend's review against another edition
3.0
Note: I received a review copy of The Bloodprint from the publisher. This has not impacted the content of my review.
Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.
I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.
The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.
I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.
Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.
I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.
The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.
I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.
jamesflint's review against another edition
2.0
There is no one but the One. And so the One commands.
Rep: Middle Eastern inspired characters and setting
I picked this book up in the bookshop probably about 6 months back, mostly based on the fact that the cover is absolutely fricking gorgeous. Aaaaand it disappointed. (Cue my mum asking why I read such bad books. It's not my fault! I'm susceptible to a pretty cover, so what?)
So why did it disappoint? Primarily, the writing.
Let me take a step back for a second. The premise and the plot in this have a lot of potential, as does the main romance (although I'm so goddamn tired of beautiful protagonists who have men falling at their feet when it adds nothing to the plot). Yes, it's a fairly heavy-handed comparison to the Taliban (Talisman/Taliban? Get it?), but that's not the problem. The problem is the execution.
Ultimately, the writing is dull and even action scenes just kind of plod along. It's descriptive, maybe venturing into purple prose territory at times, but there's never a change in pacing between non-action and action scenes. Hence, the dullness. I also really didn't like some of the stylistic choices the author made.
Like finishing every* chapter like this.
With three short sentences.
Each as their own paragraph.
(* every, or rather, enough that I noticed and got annoyed)
Because it just made the writing seem choppy and disrupted. So the scenes felt choppy and disrupted too and seemed to lack a coherent flow (not entirely I'll admit, but enough). As well as this, some scenes happened without any apparent build-up. So, because the writing felt disjointed, the plot also felt disjointed and I couldn't get into it. It also seemed to me that there was a bit of a disconnect between certain scenes and the worldbuilding. I don't know why, but sometimes it felt like a particular scene was happening disconnected of the world it was supposed to be happening in (if that makes any sense). Maybe that was partly the writing style, maybe it was a product of me skimreading (although it happened in the second chapter, at a point where I wasn't actually yet skimming, so), I don't know. But it didn't help my enjoyment (or lack of) of the book.
In addition, I only liked one character of the whole cast (Wafa) and, while I didn't actively dislike any of the rest, that's not enough for me to go on. I just didn't really care about the rest. There was a second chance romance relationship full of potential, and it just ended up being as dull as the rest of the book. I didn't care about the angst in it, or the individual characters, so I sure as hell wasn't going to be able to care about the relationship itself.
One good thing, though. The end. Although I kind of called one of the reveals, there were some other really good ones that happened. And if I hadn't been so completely bored by the previous 400+ pages, then maybe that'd have tempted me to consider book two. But as it was, it did nothing.
So, in the end, I leave this note to self: if you're going to pick a book based on its cover, maybe read some of it first.
may4d40a's review against another edition
3.0
Book 10 completed for #RamadanReadathon
daniyar i am once again asking for your hand in marriage pls
daniyar i am once again asking for your hand in marriage pls