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A review by therese_nook68
Inkmistress by Audrey Coulthurst
3.0
I ended up giving this book a 3/5 stars.
I loved this book, I thought it was a great second novel, but a good prequel to Of Fire and Stars. We definitely got to see more worldbuilding and stronger attempts at fleshing out a magic system.
I thought the representation was done wonderfully and from reading the acknowledgements, Audrey Coulthurst does mention that she did a lot of research into making sure that the representation was done right: there are mentions of gender fluid characters in the book, black characters, lesbian and bisexual characters as well. So, she did really well on that front and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her characters.
Like I said, I liked that she did try to create more of a magic system that we saw in the first book, it's not the best magic system, but I think there's room for improvement and I can't wait to see how this magic system continues to develop in the sequel.
The biggest thing that annoyed me was that I couldn't invest myself in the characters. I found them all varying degrees of annoying and the emotional attachment wasn't there. I waited for the moment where I could get attached to the characters. But instead, the characters were so hard to get invested in and I couldn't bring myself to feel anything toward their problems or their struggles.
Overall, I did enjoy this book because it was so diverse and it did add more to a world I genuinely enjoyed reading the first time, but the characters just fell kind of flat for me.
I loved this book, I thought it was a great second novel, but a good prequel to Of Fire and Stars. We definitely got to see more worldbuilding and stronger attempts at fleshing out a magic system.
I thought the representation was done wonderfully and from reading the acknowledgements, Audrey Coulthurst does mention that she did a lot of research into making sure that the representation was done right: there are mentions of gender fluid characters in the book, black characters, lesbian and bisexual characters as well. So, she did really well on that front and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her characters.
Like I said, I liked that she did try to create more of a magic system that we saw in the first book, it's not the best magic system, but I think there's room for improvement and I can't wait to see how this magic system continues to develop in the sequel.
The biggest thing that annoyed me was that I couldn't invest myself in the characters. I found them all varying degrees of annoying and the emotional attachment wasn't there. I waited for the moment where I could get attached to the characters. But instead, the characters were so hard to get invested in and I couldn't bring myself to feel anything toward their problems or their struggles.
Overall, I did enjoy this book because it was so diverse and it did add more to a world I genuinely enjoyed reading the first time, but the characters just fell kind of flat for me.