Review: The Unseen Blade

The Unseen Blade by Ambrose Z. Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book: ***
Performance: **

A Derivative YA Fantasy w/ poor narration

This is a YA coming of age story complete with a school of magic and a “chosen one.” Kids are “sorted” into specialities and placed into small “combat” teams that was ridiculously like a magical fight club (and the required bully). There is a parallel story about a conflict between werewolves and vampires that was highly predictable and not very interesting … at least until it intersects with the main plot late in the last half of the book. Of course … getting there requires a few time jumps punctuated by child combat to grievous injury et al. Despite all that, there is some character development (as might be expected with the coming of age genre). Bottomline, it was not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be given the premise from the jacket blurb. This was aggravated by the poor narration performance where the performance came across extremely awkward and wooden. It might help if playback speed is bumped up.

I was given this free advance review/listener copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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Review: The Bleeding Stone

The Bleeding Stone by Joseph John Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book: ***
Performance: ****

A Slow Fantasy with a Colonizer Trope

The story is told from the perspective of a native tribal culture in retreat from a more technologically advance colonizing civilizations that is an obvious nod how the European powers colonized the Americas. In this case, the “natives” are of course more attuned to nature (Sun Tribe, Wood Tribe, Stone Tribe, et al), with some minor supernatural gifts that are awarded by a special ceremony when they become adults. The invaders primarily use firearms (flintlocks) which apparently are too advance for the natives to figure out a counter So yeah … there despite the very interesting premise, there are parts of the world-building that are overly simplistic and tropey. That makes the main driving force behind the story the characters … with the the bad guy a typical arrogant fool and the FMC an emotional wreck … because she was born under the eclipse and should have been “exposed” as a cursed born child.

The bulk of the story focused on developing the extremely dysfunction relationships between the FMC and various members of her tribe (allies and enemies) while highlighting her self-destructive behavior that made her much less appealing over all. There are slowly revealed mysteries that remained largely unexplored (although there is a hint at the end that is really only there to pull you into the sequel). Still, the bones of a pretty good story are there. It loses points for the time jumping across three (3) separate timelines (not a fan) and the really slow (almost nonexistent) and the unsatisfactory (and rushed) ending. It gets credit for a solid narration though making it a decent piece of entertainment.

I was given this free advance review/listener copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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