Promise of Blood

I both went into this and out of this feeling pretty blah. I picked it up because it is the S&L book of the month, but I don't think I would have picked it up otherwise. Sometimes, that works out well (Ancillary Justice), but this time the reasons I thought I wouldn't enjoy it all turned out to be pretty valid.

Promise of Blood suffers from First of Trilogy syndrome. It has a ton of stuff going on and it wraps very little up. It's told from four perspectives, one of which is completely superfluous to the story of this novel. I imagine Nila and Jakob will be important in later books, but that doesn't excuse the fact that they serve absolutely no purpose in this book besides allowing the author to talk about “auburn curls.” Auburn curls are always unruly. Always.

The story has a lot of merits. I enjoyed the parts with Mihali and Tamas and would have loved a lot more information on the religions (again, this seems to be in the MORE TO COME category). Tamas himself is interesting though Taniel less so. Ka-poel seems like a giant plot device, and I hope her brand of sorcery is explained more later. The concept of powder magery is pretty neat, but not really my thing. I think I would have been more into it if it were explained as a more “man-made” sorcery rather than just “some people are born like that.”

There's a lot of war, a lot of blood, and a lot of guns, pretty much as advertised. Nothing wrong with that, but there wasn't enough else to really hold my interest. While there's nothing wrong with writing a first book as a lead in, barely any of the plots in this story got proper resolution. That doesn't make me want to read this next book so much as it annoys me for spending so much time on this one with no pay out. Probably not a series I will be continuing, but if you're into the war and guns fantasy, it might be more your thing.