Ink and Bone
Aug. 9th, 2024 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearInk and Bone by Rachel Caine was another charity shop find - unusually, the first in a YA fantasy series I'd never heard of about a world where the Great Library of Alexandria survived and somehow has become a totalitarian regime, strictly controlling access to the written word across the world...
I almost didn't make it past the opening 20 pages because there were so many things about the prologue that were so nonsensical, they even seemed that way to me (and I'm often oblivious to such things). But it got quite a bit better as it went along - though there were still many, many holes and issues with the worldbuilding and the plot throughout.
On one level, it's about a young man going to a magic school, finding friends along the way and having to battle evil forces. So far, so Harry Potter... But it's much more adult than that in a lot of ways, and it has some interesting layers about knowledge and power.
I liked a lot of the characters (though some of the peripheral ones didn't get enough page time to really come to life) and the emotion at the heart of the story was very honest and affecting in places.
I'm not sure I'm invested enough to seek out and read another four volumes, but this had enough to it to keep me reading to the end and almost to forgive how little a lot of it made sense...
I almost didn't make it past the opening 20 pages because there were so many things about the prologue that were so nonsensical, they even seemed that way to me (and I'm often oblivious to such things). But it got quite a bit better as it went along - though there were still many, many holes and issues with the worldbuilding and the plot throughout.
On one level, it's about a young man going to a magic school, finding friends along the way and having to battle evil forces. So far, so Harry Potter... But it's much more adult than that in a lot of ways, and it has some interesting layers about knowledge and power.
I liked a lot of the characters (though some of the peripheral ones didn't get enough page time to really come to life) and the emotion at the heart of the story was very honest and affecting in places.
I'm not sure I'm invested enough to seek out and read another four volumes, but this had enough to it to keep me reading to the end and almost to forgive how little a lot of it made sense...
