A Broken Blade

Character: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Well … that was a book.

A book full of typos and incorrect terminology (you do not holster a sword, a holster is for a firearm), and boring, inconsistent characters that I just … urgh. URGH. The best bit was reading it on Discord with friends, because that made it the funny kind of bad instead of the kind of bad where you have to suffer on your lonesome because you have no one to talk to about this book I have been reading and please I need to talk about it my GOD —. Anyway, this is how I want to read these YA/NA TikTok books from now on. For my mental health, see. I should probably stop reading them all together, but where’s the fun in that?

ONWARDS!

A Broken Blade is a story about our main girlboss, Keera, being a reluctant assassin for the evil tyrant colonising king. She then goes on a quest to find and apprehend a terrorist called the Shadow who has been targeting the kingdom, and learns more about the kingdom and those she serves than she’d ever dared to imagine. In order to free her fellow minorities, she must girlboss all over King Aemon (no, not a Targaryen).

Keera, as mentioned before, is our main girlboss. Just like Celaena before her, she is the bestest of best assassins ever, but she comes with a slight drinking problem, self-harm tendencies (kind of), and a truckload of depression enough to have a dramatic scream to the heavens when two people she has never met die in front of her. She was very frustrating to follow, being inconsistent with her motives (she does not want to be the Blade and tells us how much she despises taking life, but then will turn around and stab people for being collateral when there are literally other solutions available with about three seconds of thinking) and a crippling case of “I must be the most badass character in the room” and subsequently robbing people of being smart and capable themselves. Did you know you can capture a 5000 year old warrior elf just by sneaking up on her with a blowdart? Because how else is Keera going to show how much of a badass she is when she executes the rescue mission? Her whims and motives have the same unfortunate tendencies as one of our favourite BookTok queens, Sarah Maas’s, characters, that being their entire existences coast off “vibes”. In this part of the book, we want badass vibes so that she can cold-heartedly murder people. In this part of the book, we want dramatic vibes so that we can race the clock and ride our horses to death (despite the fact that huffing them up on magic cocaine is not a solution). In that part of the book, it’s tragic hero vibes when she almost blows herself up and asks to be left to die, for she is too damaged, and tired, and evil for this world, as her boyfriend tearfully carries her off bridal-style to try and save her life.

Can we stop writing YA protagonists whose entire personalities are vibes? Thanks! :)

The supporting characters were likewise frustrating to read about. They didn’t seem very smart or beholden to being themselves because of the whims of the plot. They defer to Keera for seemingly stupid reasons, they constantly hold the Idiot Ball so Keera can show off, and overall just plain suck. Their only purpose is to act as Keera’s cheerleaders. You go, girlboss! Go gaslight gatekeep them bitches!

Next, I want to touch on the insane number of typos in this book and the countless examples of misused terminology, such as the holster one mentioned above. We have characters who treaded off the main path, despite treaded only being a word in the context of “treaded tyres”, characters “setting the charges” for their gunpowder plots, despite setting charges needing electricity to actually work, the leaf of rabbit (wtf?), the constant “farther” vs. “further” confusions, etc. The typos were at least funny. You have characters avoiding each other in alleys by giving them “wide births”, one character biting the inside of his “check”, and a particularly memorable one at the end where the apostrophe in “don’t” is replaced by its unicode character (don2019;t). I hope these typos are not in the print version. Especially the last one.

This is an excellent part to segway into the poor prose. You can really tell this is one of the author’s first attempts at writing a book, if not the first. Overall, it was amateur. The characters are constantly communicating with the same five actions of body language (smirking, stiffening backs, brows furrowing, taking single steps towards another character/object, etc. did you know the word “brow” appears in the book more times than Keera’s name? (137 vs. 120)), and there is very little variety in the prose; lots of sentences starting with “I did action”, lots of fragmented sentences, and repeating words. The more egregious instances of the bad writing though were in the action sequences, which were written in a very wooden step-by-step manner of “I did this, my opponent did that, and this was the outcome. Repeat until scene is finished”. Very video gamey. Very IKEA manual. Slay, kween! This book definitely needed more time in the oven, and more drafts.

The worldbuilding was not that well thought out, especially, for me, regarding how old stuff is. You have characters who are hundreds or even thousands of years old, but acting like shitty teenagers or incredibly stupid adults who go through life by throwing literal tantrums. What? I think the idea of multiple celestial bodies such as the multiple suns or moons was cool, but it really feels like an afterthought. There wasn’t anything in the way how two suns might affect anything. Are the lengths of days and nights different to Earth’s because of how light falls on spheres? Do the suns and moons even have different names? There were mention of “gods” in the world, but what gods? What religion? Is Keera religious? Or is it just a left over expression from a time before the king oppressed religion and now everyone’s agnostic or atheist or they worship him as a god king? Be prepared to never find out because it’s only mentioned once at the end. For flavour like so much else.

Finally, the book wanted to do an exploration of a colonised people, but I felt this was a very surface level kind of exploration. There’s a lot of talk about Halflings being oppressed, but the oppression they face is very … I want to say “20th/21st century flavour” as in these characters aren’t allowed to do things full-blooded humans can because they have icky Elf/Fae blood, and are enslaved by either being put into brothels or made into assassins for the king or they’re put into work camps or something. I’m not actually sure, because it’s never really talked about other than as bad things that are happening somewhere vaguely on the map. The situation sucks, but it sucks in a very sanitised “over there” fashion. It’s something we as readers can all agree is bad without having to do much else. It’s a Colonialism Aftermath 101 online echo chamber, and for that it’s just boring, and kind of insulting. It’s acknowledging a very harmful, traumatised, hurting, and deepset issue in society, and just slapping a bandaid on it by having Keera roast other characters reminiscent of what one does when constructing clapback arguments in the shower. But the big solution to fixing this as presented by the book is our main cast plotting to kill the head of government. Because that makes sense I guess. Never mind that the government has been running on this system for seven hundred years and so produced dozens of generations of people (on both sides!) who like it and wouldn’t want it to change. Didn’t you know that discrimination stops being a thing when a head of government vacates their position and all the prejudices and policies and attitudes that are baked into the society they were the head of are just wiped out overnight? Damn, me neither. That’s what I wanted to explore. Keera girly, you stinky badger, I thought you were supposed to be the smart one here.

Finally, we’ll touch on Keera’s drinking. Her alcohol dependency was not well written. She can kick it with very little effort other than some cravings every so often to remind us that that was a thing. Because didn’t you know, if you just try hard enough, you can bin any of your drug dependency habits just like that! If you’ve got the willpowerrr! What do you mean it can come with health effects? What do you mean going cold turkey after thirty years of drinking daily until you’re blind drunk can kill you? The same lack of thought is taken regarding the self-harm. Keera cuts the names of her targets into her skin every time she kills them, and says she does it to remember her victims. I thought this was a cool idea until she mentions that she makes her scars look pretty by designing them like Elven warrior tattoos, which really distorts the message being delivered. Are you doing penitence, do you actually have mental health issues regarding self-harm, or are you just doing it to give yourself edgy tattoos?

I guess mixed messages is the ultimate message of the book, and I hope the next books Melissa Blair writes have gone through more rounds of revision. But for now, I’m just glad it’s done.