![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearInk by Alice Broadway has a very enticing cover - it's almost entirely covered by a swirling black and gold pattern of feathers, plants and birds, with a small figure of a girl enclosing the title and author (both of which are quite difficult to see). There are only seven words on the back and not much more in the blurb on the inside front cover.
The story is about Leora, who grows up in a society where everyone's achievements, mistakes, and biggest emotional moments are marked on their skin as tattoos, from a very early age. Leora is taking her final exams at school, which will determine her future career - she wants to be an Inker, someone who makes the marks on people's bodies. But there are potentially bigger obstacles for her than her exam grades - her father is recently dead and his life is due to be judged to determine if he is worthy of being remembered.
The worldbuilding of Leora's society is very well done - I was interested in the setting and the politics of the supposed threat from the 'blanks', exiled people who choose not to mark their skin. I liked Leora as a protagonist and felt her emotional journey strongly. Lots of the other characters were good too, and the inter-relationships were well-drawn and compelling.
But it all felt very thin on plot. The stakes in terms of the father potentially being barred from the afterlife were emotionally high for Leora, but there was never a huge sense of actual threat. Plus, her own attitude to the situation fluctuated wildly without much rationale towards the end. The budding teen romance wasn't given enough page-time to be credible. The underlying political machinations of the mayor and the storyteller didn't really go anywhere. And Leora's own actions at the very end felt unmoored from any consequences or true significance.
And then I discovered it's the first in the trilogy - and it made more sense. So, this book is very much just the setup for the story to come - which may well be a good one. But I felt a bit cheated, in that this first one was quite short, but the background information and building of the story was very drawn-out and I didn't feel as if any of the characters, relationships or plot points were given enough depth to really pull me into the story.
So, an interesting read in a lot of ways, but not enough meat to be satisfying on its own or actually to make me want to read the others.
The story is about Leora, who grows up in a society where everyone's achievements, mistakes, and biggest emotional moments are marked on their skin as tattoos, from a very early age. Leora is taking her final exams at school, which will determine her future career - she wants to be an Inker, someone who makes the marks on people's bodies. But there are potentially bigger obstacles for her than her exam grades - her father is recently dead and his life is due to be judged to determine if he is worthy of being remembered.
The worldbuilding of Leora's society is very well done - I was interested in the setting and the politics of the supposed threat from the 'blanks', exiled people who choose not to mark their skin. I liked Leora as a protagonist and felt her emotional journey strongly. Lots of the other characters were good too, and the inter-relationships were well-drawn and compelling.
But it all felt very thin on plot. The stakes in terms of the father potentially being barred from the afterlife were emotionally high for Leora, but there was never a huge sense of actual threat. Plus, her own attitude to the situation fluctuated wildly without much rationale towards the end. The budding teen romance wasn't given enough page-time to be credible. The underlying political machinations of the mayor and the storyteller didn't really go anywhere. And Leora's own actions at the very end felt unmoored from any consequences or true significance.
And then I discovered it's the first in the trilogy - and it made more sense. So, this book is very much just the setup for the story to come - which may well be a good one. But I felt a bit cheated, in that this first one was quite short, but the background information and building of the story was very drawn-out and I didn't feel as if any of the characters, relationships or plot points were given enough depth to really pull me into the story.
So, an interesting read in a lot of ways, but not enough meat to be satisfying on its own or actually to make me want to read the others.
