Blood Over Bright Haven

Non-spoiler review:

This was a fine book but it did a few things that bugged me.

FULL SPOILERS:

I feel strange with how I ended up feeling about this one. It’s definitely not a bad book by any means and I could see this being a favorite for some. Not for me.

I think generally books with an emphasis on anything academic kind of lose me right away, but I don’t really think that was what bugged me with this. I even thought it was pretty cool how the magic was kind of controlled by writing lines of code. As a software engineer I thought that was a pretty fun touch! And most of the academics were done before we really got into the meat of the story anyway so I don’t think this was too big of a deal.

I also think the romance was unnecessary, but to be completely fair, generally speaking, I’m not really into romance in my books. It’s pretty much always hit or miss for me. Knowing that, I don’t usually find that it bothers me all that much beyond not really holding my interest and I generally don’t let it factor too heavily into my rating unless I think the romance was truly handled poorly. I think it seemed fine to me here for the most part but I didn’t care about it and I’m not 100% sure the story would have e suffered from taking it out. But by the end I didn’t hold the romance against the book either.

I think that my main issue with this book, above all else’s, was that I just didn’t find it to be believable. Of course I don’t mean that I need the fantasy elements to be believable. I don’t care if magic is realistic. And honestly in that regard this isn’t the least believable magic system. I mean more that the human elements weren’t believable. I can’t get past the fact that only one person ever has taken issue with the fact that they’re killing people (or other things) every time the want to boil some water. Surely SOMEONE else must have thought that was wrong, right? Apparently not. Or at least there was no one who acted on it. No one who felt strongly enough to do something or at the very least say something about it to someone. And you’re kind of almost made to believe that they were all okay with it because they were men too?

I’m not at ALL saying that sexism is not a very real and serious issue, but I also don’t think that men are just always okay with genocide.

The themes were heavy handed but again the author is trying to start conversations on very real topics and much of it I think landed, but this part was asking a little much of the reader in my opinion.

I do think I’ll still recommend this book to some, but only if I really know the person and feel that it will be something they like. It definitely doesn’t get a sweeping recommendation from me. I am an outlier here for sure.