Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe

It took me a while to properly gel with this one, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is urban fantasy with an interesting twist. Leaning heavily into the books about books trope, the base concept here is that there exists magical books in the world that people will literally kill to collect. The ability to sense these magical books is an inherited trait amongst certain families, with an even rarer ability to write them existing too.

You can tell this book comes from a love of books. Libraries form a large part of its setting and the quirks of book collecting inform into the story. Taking place very much in a current world this is somewhat typical urban fantasy for the most part, with the magical world hidden in plain sight.

The story begins in medias res, with one of our characters running from various problems hiding out in a base on Antarctica. Our other POV characters are maintaining a collection of magical books and listening to a recitation of their latest book creation. In someways the start was a bit jarring (and Antarctic bases are quite an extreme example of a hiding place - I struggled with the wisdom of this one as this character is required to move on a specific day each year. The Antarctic seems like an excellent place to get stuck and be unable to travel due to weather etc...). That is often the nature of such a narrative style, but I do think the three POVs in wildly different locales did not help me here. That being said, as the story continued and the POV characters were drawn together I found myself increasingly engaged in what was going on. The central mystery is well worked and satisfying in its denouement.

Urban fantasy is not necessarily a style I favour (I find the setting often gets a bit distracting and the idea that the fantasy world coexists with the real can end up feeling somewhat silly), but this books central plotting was clever enough to keep me thoroughly engaged. The central conceits of the world building were well drawn and just on the right side of a believability to work with an Urban Fantasy setting for me. One of the better examples of this sub-genre!