ebook_em's Reviews (960)

medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

What a treat to see what Shannon Chakraborty left on the cutting room floor of the Daevabad trilogy. It left me wanting even more, and River of Silver delivered. I love these additional scenes and have even more respect for Chakraborty’s character development and worldbuilding for the fact that these stories informed, but weren’t part of, the main trilogy. 
emotional hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I honestly could have rated this anywhere between 3 and 5 stars, but I landed on 4.5 because the story was so engrossing and I’ll probably think about this book for a long time. 

Set in the 1960s, Singer Distance is a genre-bending novel about the disappearance of Crystal Singer following her successful communication with Martians using a mathematical proof etched into the desert. There is some hard sci-fi in the book, but it’s mostly about relationships among very flawed  humans and the distance (real and figurative) between them. 

The premise was a bit confusing at times and I suspected some scientific accuracy might have been sacrificed for the sake of poetry. The dialogue and character depictions felt more contemporary than mid-20th century, and the two main characters were incredibly frustrating. That said, I loved the writing style, the road trip motif, and the reflective mood. It reminded me of Station Eleven mashed together with Interstellar. Overall, I highly recommend this for people looking for a really unique & meandering story with a sci-fi twist. 

My spotify playlist based on Singer Distance: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6LM7vRZIpZqDhORmXih1zq?si=77a0f059b43e4456 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
adventurous dark tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

 
The Blood Gift picks up where The Blood Trials left off and I was so excited to read more of Ikenna’s adventures. 
 
Ikenna is such a compelling protagonist to begin with and I thought her character development was even better in this book than in The Blood Trials. Her anger and arrogance took on new, fascinating dimensions as she became more strategic and learned how to harness her gift. I was skeptical of the romance subplot in the first book but I came around to it in The Blood Gift. I also loved the found family elements within Ikenna’s squad and thought her encounters with the gods were really interesting. Similar to the Blood Trials, this book offers great commentary on colonialism, racism, sexism, patriotism, militarism, tyranny, and so much more. 
 
Despite how much there was to love about this book, a few things frustrated me and ultimately lowered my rating. Without the trials in book one, the plot of the Blood Gift was variously driven by political intrigue, character relationships, and supernatural elements — but none felt fully developed. The world building usually happened through info dumps in dialogue, making it a bit clunky and hard to follow. A petty gripe is that the word “suffused” appeared so often that I was taken out of the story every time it appeared (all authors have overused words, so the fact that this particular one grated on me might just be a “me” problem). Finally, though this isn’t a complaint about the series itself, I wish I had known ahead of time that the books read like young adult novels; I have no problem with YA-ish writing but I was thrown off by incorrect expectations. 
 
My favorite part of The Blood Gift was the last 20% or so — if more of the book had resembled the last quarter, I might have rated it 5 stars. Overall, this was a satisfying end to the duology and even though it didn’t meet all my hopes and dreams for the sequel, it was an enjoyable read. 
 
My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for an ARC of this book. 

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