Evie Manieri describes herself as a fan of intricacies. I would describe the plotting of The Wire as intricate, where certain
actions don’t pay off for 1 or maybe 2 seasons.
Blood’s Pride must be a whole
other sort of intricate, most likely meaning cramming as much as possible into
a single story.
The story of Blood’s
Pride takes place a generation after the city state of Shadar is conquered
by the seafaring Norlanders. The
Norlanders have come in order to control magical ore which can only be found in
Shadar. Needless to say, the people of
Shadar are not happy about the brutal rule of the Norlanders, and Blood’s Pride is about their attempt to
overthrow the rule of the Norlanders and regain control of their own city.
Before getting into some of the problems of Blood’s Pride, let me mention a couple
of things that worked well for me. First
of all, Manieri’s overall vision is admirable.
She has envisioned a fantasy that is different from the norm. Sure, some of the characters do fit some
familiar tropes – the mixed blooded outsider, the slave who is really a secret
king, etc. But the overall storyline of
a city fighting back against foreign oppression is not one commonly told. Secondly, she does a good job with the pacing
of her story. I found myself being
pushed forward to the end of the book quite rapidly. In a new fantasy world, she doesn’t waste
time on info dumps or other long expository passages, but focuses on plot
development instead. This means that in
spite of the flaws of the book, it is an entertaining read.
But there are some problems with Blood’s Pride as well. Some
of them are logical, and there may be explanations that work that we simply
haven’t received yet. For example, how
is a culture that can’t be exposed to sunlight an effective expansionistic
empire? Wouldn’t that whole “sunlight
kills them” thing be a very effective natural deterrent to their
activities? Another culture is split
between living in the desert and at sea, yet has members who are gingers. As a ginger myself, I can tell you that
neither boating nor desert excursions are things that gingers are well suited
for. While she packs plenty of cool
ideas and details into the book, most of them create more problems than they
solve, once you begin to examine them.
For example, how do they transport those huge flying animals on ships? Why use the ships if they can fly? How does that magical ore make those
swords? And if they bring the blood
south to pre-bond the swords, how are they transporting that much blood in a
world without refrigeration? See what I
mean? Now this is only the first book of
a trilogy, and many of these problems may be resolved in the later
volumes. But it is a bad sign when this
seems to be a trend in only the first book.
A more significant problem is the development of the
characters. There have been some complaints
about her naming conventions, with readers saying that they found it difficult
to follow. I don’t think that the
problem is with the names, per se.
Rather it is with the character development. Blood’s
Pride has a rather large cast of characters, and unfortunately they are
thinly developed at best. What’s
happening is that readers are confused by shifting perspectives on the story
due to the lack of character depth. The
tangible thing that they can latch onto is the names, but the real issue is the
lack of in depth character development.
The names themselves are no stranger than bog standard fantasy names.
I thought that Blood’s Pride was an entertaining read with a
fast paced plot and an unusual fantasy world.
Unfortunately that was overshadowed by the author’s tendency to cram too
much into a single volume. Not only are
there too many loose ends in the world building, but character development has
also suffered as a result. It doesn’t
matter how many “oh cool” ideas or moments are in the story if the reader isn’t
invested in the characters.
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