![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland
Feb. 20th, 2025 01:12 pmFive Broken Blades
3/5. A group of six people come together to murder the unkillable god king, but they’re all liars, it gets complicated.
This is mis-marketed as gritty-ish twisty fantasy when it’s actually most interested in its romances (there are six characters, they enter the arc two-by-two). So just know that going in. Also, I feel I should warn for the thing where this has six points-of-view and they are all written in first person present, which is . . . a choice.
Anyway, this has some amount of intrigue and charm going for it, but I tired of the steep dips in writing quality whenever it came to the romances (and the writing is never good to start with). And also the thing where we get first person POVs of people and everyone is hiding something from the reader, which is hard to pull off and Corland does not have those chops. This is a particular peeve of mine.
I read it, it reads fast and easy, I enjoyed parts of it, but now I have no interest in the sequel, even though it promises to blow the worldbuilding wide open.
Content notes: A lot of violence and murder, references to gory execution methods, child trafficking and child abuse.
3/5. A group of six people come together to murder the unkillable god king, but they’re all liars, it gets complicated.
This is mis-marketed as gritty-ish twisty fantasy when it’s actually most interested in its romances (there are six characters, they enter the arc two-by-two). So just know that going in. Also, I feel I should warn for the thing where this has six points-of-view and they are all written in first person present, which is . . . a choice.
Anyway, this has some amount of intrigue and charm going for it, but I tired of the steep dips in writing quality whenever it came to the romances (and the writing is never good to start with). And also the thing where we get first person POVs of people and everyone is hiding something from the reader, which is hard to pull off and Corland does not have those chops. This is a particular peeve of mine.
I read it, it reads fast and easy, I enjoyed parts of it, but now I have no interest in the sequel, even though it promises to blow the worldbuilding wide open.
Content notes: A lot of violence and murder, references to gory execution methods, child trafficking and child abuse.