Promise of Blood

Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

I have been meaning to read this book for years, and have now come away disappointed.

In the depths of a political coup that sees the country of Adro’s monarchy overthrown and its nobility stripped of their positions, wealth, and power, four stories entwine: the first is that of Field Marshall Tamas, war hero, general of Adro’s armies, and mastermind behind the coup with a personal hatred for the monarchy; Tamas’s son, Taniel, who struggles with a cocaine-like addiction to gunpowder and is hunting down the last remaining member of the royal magical cabal; Adamat, a private investigator tasked with uncovering a plot to bring down this new government; and Nila, who is desperately trying to keep the last noble heir to the throne out of the hands of coup sympathisers. All the while, the countries surrounding Adro look to take advantage of the political upheavals, and an ancient, malevolent promise tied up in magic stirs in the shadows.

So this sounded right up my alley. A French Revolution inspired book? Hell yeah! Bring it on, I’ve gotten super into the Revolution over the COVID lockdowns! Well, I wish I’d read this book back in 2016/2017 when I originally bought it. Back then I would have been captivated, what with its magic system, action-heavy plot, and my lack of knowledge about the Revolution 😅 But I’m not the kind of reader this book is aimed at anymore.

Firstly, the characters. Beneath their two or three unique traits, they all felt pretty samey — gruff, masculine, stoic, justified, yet quietly broken by the world (the one female POV, Nila, was barely in the book). Tamas trying to cling onto power should be fascinating to read about, and Taniel’s struggles not just with his addiction and his broken engagement, but with his complex feelings as Tamas’s son and heir, should be riveting; indeed, their relationship was the most compelling in the book. But mostly, I was struck by the feeling that I have read these characters before, many times, and done better.

Tamas has mostly selfish reasons in running this coup, first and foremost for the fact that Adro’s king was trying to broker a peace treaty with the nation responsible for the death of Tamas’s wife. And sure, there were other reasons for the coup, such as national debt and the king being incompetent in a handwaved fashion, but between these reasonings and his actions, the motivation for the coup struck me as … odd, doubly so since there doesn’t seem to be an environment for Enlightened ideals, but that’s a subject for later. In short, I had trouble reconciling what Tamas was saying he wanted and believed on the page, and how he acted.

Taniel is, as mentioned, Tamas’s son. Like his father, Taniel is a Powder Mage and a war hero, but he’s recently discovered his fiancée having an affair and has turned to a “powder trance” to help cope with the betrayal, which has become a full-blown addiction. He is accompanied by another, mute young woman (girl?) called Ka-poel who he met whilst fighting in her country; he calls her a savage. His plot is in hunting down an unusually powerful Privileged (a type of magician) which then spirals into a siege to stop first a rival country’s army, and then a god, from destroying Adro. It also turns out that Ka-poel is an insanely powerful magic user so that’s cool I guess.

Adamat, the private investigator, was uncompelling after his contract was changed from “discover what the king’s dying words meant” to “find out who’s trying to assassinate Tamas on behalf of the Kez”. His scenes become reduced to questioning the other people who helped Tamas stage the coup and drawing conclusions based off them. I was disappointed that the traitor after Tamas turned out to be the head of the church, because who else would it be?

Nila has next to no page time and a plot that’s seemingly there to set up for the next book.

The overall plot I thought was predictable. I don’t mind being able to see where a story is going, as I care more about the solutions to questions posed, yet I often found the answers in Promise of Blood to be the first solution you think of, such as the before mentioned “it was the head of the church all along!” plot about who the traitor to Adro is, which just made the story an exercise in getting to the next section. Furthermore, I found the micro-politics bland and the macro wanting further love, and the magic system, whilst interesting with its splits between lower Knacked, higher Privileged, and new-player Powder Mages, taking over too much of the conversation when I wanted to know about other stuff. After all, this is fake-Revolutionary France! There’s so much to explore here! Yet the political and social climate felt far away and not on the forefront of McClellan’s mind. Hence, the imagery of the Revolution, but not the ideas and driving forces of it.

I’m also over hard, RPG inspired magic systems at this point, which leads me onto my final reason I think the book didn’t gel with me …

It felt like a Sanderson book. He has a pull-quote on the cover for a reason I guess lmao

As I was reading, I was trying to put my finger on why exactly I wasn’t gelling with the story beyond the characters and it not covering the subject matter I was hoping it to (after all, I enjoy the action-heavy revolution plot of Red Rising), and then it hit me — it felt like a Sanderson book. The emphasis on the hard magic system, the action set pieces, and the characters having a few exaggerated traits instead of feeling like more nuanced and complex personalities (Mihali and Wit being written in the same comic relief style was what led me to the Sanderson epiphany). Obviously, it has worked fabulously for Brian; he has completed two very successful trilogies and is in the middle of publishing his third. Go get your money, this industry is hard to make a living in!

I’ve danced around the French Revolution-inspired stuff for the length of this review, and the short of it is: I wanted to explore that inspiration more. I realised fairly quickly that I had to let my wants go if I wanted to enjoy the book, and subsequently tried hard not to compare the two, but my mind kept drifting back to a what could have been. As mentioned previously, Promise of Blood borrows liberally from the imagery of the Revolution but doesn’t do much in the way of revolutionary ideas beyond some handwaving towards vague Enlightenment happenings over there. Which I found really sad. The French Revolution is so interesting (and I say this as someone who didn’t care for modern history at all until recently), but this book is more like French Coup inspired, no matter how many guillotines and double-breasted coats you see.

Now, to sniff my own farts for a second. One thing which I thought was such a detriment to its French Revolution-inspired setting is the decision to introduce God Himself into the mix, defending the Adro royal family from those who would overthrow it. One of the advantages absolute monarchs like Louis XIV-XVI had to keep their hold on power was a concept called Divine Right, which is “the monarch is the monarch because God decreed it so”. I can see the leap of logic one could make when writing a story like this as “what if Divine Right had tangible consequences should it be challenged?”, and it could be a fascinating story had Tamas and his conspirators chosen to do the coup anyway knowing the consequences … but they didn’t know the consequences. God existing as a thing that can actually kill them is the answer to the central mystery of the book, and it left me feeling annoyed more than anything. “The monarchy has been overthrown and the nobility stripped and killed! But what’s this? It’s Kresimir with the steel chair!” Yes, I’m biased in that I don’t like God of any kind, be it in this book, Final Fantasy, etc., revealing themselves to be the final boss, but with the context surrounding this case, it stung more than normal lol.

So, Promise of Blood isn’t for 2023-me, and that’s fine. It’s not like there’s a lack of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars material out there, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of non-fiction books on the actual topic/s. Would I possibly like it more should I revisit it one day? Sure. But I have so many other books to read that any revisiting is a while away.