It is time to abandon ship me mateys!

I just could not finish it. I tried. And tried. And tried again. Failure. I only managed to read 228 pages out of 415. I even liked the main character, Lin, a super lot. Now, this book got many starred reviews. People seemed to love it. Many authors that I enjoy blurbed it – Fran Wilde and A. M. Dellamonica among them. They said it was a wonderful debut set in a world full of music.

I can agree with the full of music part. This book is all about music. Music permeated the sections I managed to read anyway. Perhaps that was the issue. I am sadly not musically inclined myself. Now do not get me wrong, I enjoy a sea shanty or two and do sometimes spend entire evenings enjoying the art of music. But music does not live in my soul like it does for some other scalawags I know. If I had to do without, I would survive and still be hearty. However, I do have some of me crew who removing music from their lives would almost be like turning them over to the gallows. They would rather hang then lose music.

I thought most of the characters were two-dimensional, the world building not strong enough, and the conflict to be rather boring. So maybe this novel is just not for me. But I can count the number of books I have not finished on two hands and am very sad to have added to the list. Had I know people compared the writing style to Patricia McKillip and Guy Gavriel Kay (I have read their novels but not particularly loved them) then I probably would have forgone this novel in the first place. If you read this book and think it is the most wonderful thing ever, I would love to hear about it. But this Captain refuses to go down with this ship.

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