Blood Song

As far as the fantasy genre is concerned, I have had a few bad experiences as of late. The last fantasy book I read, A Dance with Dragons, was not so much a book I disliked, as a book I was extremely disappointed with, because it seemed to stretch out a 500 page story into double that length. Blood Song, however, does not suffer from this problem. In fact, couple interesting action, with a hero's journey, and this novel reminded me that fantasy does not have to be about Kings and Queens to be fun and exciting. Yet, there are still some problems that keep this book from being a 4 to 5 star book for me, and I'll be interested to see what the author does to remedy the problems I had in the next book.

The best strength of Blood Song is the main character, Vaelin Al Sorna. He is only a young boy when his father drops him off at the gates of the sixth order and does not come back. The Sixth Order is devoted to the faith of Vaelin's country, and they fight to protect it. Now, Vaelin will be trained to become a warrior, and work to earn his keep amongst his Brothers. But as he joins the world of blood, sweat, and death, he will also be brought into a political and magical plot much bigger than himself, and Vaelin will be left wondering if fighting for the Sixth Order is all he was meant to do, or if he was meant for something more.

Vaelin himself was an excellent character, simply by the virtue of being not good enough. In many stories like this, one sees the main protagonist as being good at everything from swordplay and archery to sitting on a stool. Yet, Vaelin, thankfully, has some flaws. One of which being his inability to do archery very well, and he is even worse when shooting from a galloping horse. He also struggles as a blacksmith and with survival in the forest. It was extremely refreshing to see someone who had weaknesses with his fighting style, and who was not a perfect warrior. This makes the instances where we see Vaelin fight someone with a sword, and others are amazed what he can do, we the reader know that this is because it is his strength, and he is not perfect at everything, making many fights all the more believable.


The fights themselves are also fun and exciting, especially coming off of a series like Game of Thrones, which had little action overall. These fights not only are against interesting people, but also take place in interesting locations. They fight in open plains, the docks of harbors, and even heavily wooded forests. The fight scenes also vary in terms of length, with people who you think would have video game boss levels of epicness tied to them being over in a few seconds because Vaelin himself knows how to defeat them. This makes for fun fight scenes that help to make the book exciting and fun to read. I never found them to be too gruesome for the level of writing, nor too frequent to become tedious.

Yet, this book does have some problems that keep it from being a four or five star book for me. One of these is the fact that the side characters are just not as strongly written as the author thinks they are. Many of them tend to boil down to a person who can do X thing really well, and that is it. Often times, when these side characters die, I can tell that the author wants us to care, but I found myself asking “Wait, who was that again?” This is not a good sign. They simply are not as developed as they could be, and so they have little impact on the reader when they die or are written out of the story.

Next, there is the time jumps. We first meet Vaelin when he is telling his story to a scribe who is from an enemy country. The scribe has his own biases, and we can see that at certain points in the book, when the narrative jumps out of Vaelin's story at his training, and then back into Vaelin talking to the scribe as an adult. The only problem is that the author uses these opportunities to jump through time, and we have no idea how much time has passed, or even when exactly we are in the story of Vaelin's life between where we last were, and the adult Vaelin. This gets especially messy towards the end of the book, when things occur, and someone has to die, and it is supposed to be really dramatic, but I am just sitting there wondering when exactly this took place, because it doesn't make sense and I AM VERY CONFUSED!!

This means that Blood Song had a good opening, but just didn't manage to stick the landing. I'm still going to read the next book, and, for all I know, the third, despite it's worryingly low rating, but I'm still going to give this book a three out of five. I just hope that the next song is more enjoyable to listen to.