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laurathebookhermit 's review for:
The Black Hunger
by Nicholas Pullen
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
First I would like to say thank you to Little, Brown Book Group and NetGalley for giving me access to an e-arc.
I don't always remind people to check trigger warnings and reviews of books... but this book I feel it's necessary to make a note of this. The triggers are extensive in this book!
Things that I loved/enjoyed about this book... the initial location is local to where I live. It was fun to read a book set in places I can visualise well because I know them in real life. On top of that, the description and world building was impeccable in this. Until later in the book where it bordered on overly extensive. I am also a sucker for educational environments in fiction along with beautiful travel scenes and a beautiful romance and some gorgeous friendships too. The "bad guys" were unique and well written... I really enjoyed the tension that built between the "good guys" and "bad guys". I would recommend the audio too as there are a lot of words that the audio helps with the pronunciation of. Both the writing and the audio have been produced really well. Including different accents and voices to distinguish between characters and locations well. Although, there isn't a lot of time spent on he travelling between places, you visit so many places within the story that you will feel like you've been around the world in 80 days... in a good way. It's very atmospheric and the tension builds deliciously. I also felt that it could be considered a retelling of Genghis Khan to some degree too. There was a lot of religious and cultural concepts mentioned that I ended up googling to see if they were inspired by history.
I also, really appreciated the mental health description and representation.
Things I didn't enjoy were the lack of chapters... it was split into parts, but the parts were long and I personally prefer to have chapters. I also got confused when the pov changed... it wasn't as clear as it could have been at first. I also didn't particularly appreciate that the only people that accepted queerness were the bad guys.
I don't always remind people to check trigger warnings and reviews of books... but this book I feel it's necessary to make a note of this. The triggers are extensive in this book!
Things that I loved/enjoyed about this book... the initial location is local to where I live. It was fun to read a book set in places I can visualise well because I know them in real life. On top of that, the description and world building was impeccable in this. Until later in the book where it bordered on overly extensive. I am also a sucker for educational environments in fiction along with beautiful travel scenes and a beautiful romance and some gorgeous friendships too. The "bad guys" were unique and well written... I really enjoyed the tension that built between the "good guys" and "bad guys". I would recommend the audio too as there are a lot of words that the audio helps with the pronunciation of. Both the writing and the audio have been produced really well. Including different accents and voices to distinguish between characters and locations well. Although, there isn't a lot of time spent on he travelling between places, you visit so many places within the story that you will feel like you've been around the world in 80 days... in a good way. It's very atmospheric and the tension builds deliciously. I also felt that it could be considered a retelling of Genghis Khan to some degree too. There was a lot of religious and cultural concepts mentioned that I ended up googling to see if they were inspired by history.
I also, really appreciated the mental health description and representation.
Things I didn't enjoy were the lack of chapters... it was split into parts, but the parts were long and I personally prefer to have chapters. I also got confused when the pov changed... it wasn't as clear as it could have been at first. I also didn't particularly appreciate that the only people that accepted queerness were the bad guys.