Ink Blood Sister Scribe

I was interested in this book – it wasn't one of my most anticipated books but I did have my eye on it. Unfortunately the interest fizzled out quickly. I liked the book but not enough to give it a higher rating. I was bored, but not enough to stop reading it. I'm glad that I was speed reading it and reading the ebook and audio because if I were just reading one and at a slower pace – a definite dnf, that I can tell you.

I had various issues but a big one was that it was Adult but the writing seesawed from feeling Adult to feeling YA. The characters were Adult and their experiences were Adult, but the writing, quite a couple of times, felt like any other YA book. I actually thought it was YA at first because the cover looked YA to me and the synopsis could be a YA book as well.

For the first 10 or 20% I couldn't tell the sisters apart in their chapters. The sentence would say Esther and I had to remind myself of which one she was. Their voices and personalities did start to become more visibly/easier to tell apart as I carried on. I really liked Nicholas and Collins – more than I did the sisters. They felt like they had more personality right off the bat whereas it (for me) took a while for the sisters to grow on me.

I, and I know a bunch of other readers felt the same, did not see Joanna and Collins' romance coming at all. It was extremely out of the blue and I didn't see any chemistry between them. All throughout I'm thinking “cool when are Collins and Nicholas getting together? Nice, a bodyguard romance.”

My other issues were the pacing and worldbuilding. The pacing was so extremely slow. It only really picked up in the last few chapters but even then it still felt a bit slow. The world building was ok but I wanted more? I wanted to know more about everything. More about the world and the spells and the magic system. The characters exploring all the books and the magic. But I also wouldn't want a sequel because this book didn't interest me enough (to want for a sequel).