Paper & Blood

Maybe a 3.25/5 for me. I still enjoyed the world and the shenanigans we get up to in this one, but overall I found that story generally weaker than the first book. Hopefully this is just 2nd book syndrome or something.

We rejoin sigil agent Al MacBharrais on yet another adventure, but this time in Australia, as he helps an agent-in-training, Ya-Ping, track down her missing mentor and fellow sigil agent, Lin Shu-hua. He's joined, of course, by his hobgoblin Buck Foi, and then also by the Iron Druid, who now goes by Connor. The adventure quickly turns deadly, of course, with demons popping up committing brutal murders along a nature trail.

So... I usually listen to a lot of audiobooks and it's pretty crucial to my reading progress. For this book, however, I found that I wasn't able to keep up at all with the audiobook. I'm honestly conflicted with how I feel about the narrator, Luke Daniels, though - he's definitely not bad. It might even be because he's too performative that I found that I couldn't get into the audiobook. He does a great job performing the various accents in this book - beyond Scottish, we now also have Australian. Because the whole book is from the MaBharrais's perspective, the whole audiobook was read in a Scottish accent. I'm personally not used to listening to audiobooks with Scottish accents so I found that I simply could not, for the life of me, keep up. I had to slow down the audiobook a lot more than my usual speed in order to even understand what was happening. I also wasn't a fan of Daniels's interpretation of Buck Foi. Foi is definitely boisterous but Daniels performed him as perpetually boisterous, which got a little grating and tiring. He sounded a lot like an Austin Powers character all the time.

That aside, I also felt like the book lacked focus. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for anything actually serious in these books - in fact, that's why I love the Iron Druid and now the Ink & Sigil series - because it's irreverent and doesn't take itself too seriously. But I also felt like most of the time I simply had no idea what was going on or why I should care. I did keep going however, because the action on hand was engaging enough, but I wasn't very invested in anything as a whole.

I also didn't like the involvement of the Iron Druid. I have nothing against him as a character, but I'm only 2 books into the Iron Druid series and I was going through this book perpetually afraid that I would get spoiled for something in the series. I'm not even sure if I did or not, probably because I'm not far in enough to know what counts as a spoiler and what doesn't. Nevertheless, if you're going to be writing a spin-off series that seems to be chronologically after another established and completed series, either declare very prominently that this series contains spoilers for another, or just don't include stories/characters from the other series so you don't accidentally spoil your readers.

Some spoilery thoughts: It was fine and dandy that the Morrigan showed up and swore Al and Buck to secrecy about her identity, but then it was really silly that she went about essentially tearing down her own disguise after that. I know she said she wasn't really adept at acting like an Australian woman but at some points she didn't even seem like she was trying, when she suggests to Ya-ping something about murdering men who dishonour them. Overall, although she was trying to keep her presence a secret from the Iron Druid, I felt like she was also trying her darnedest to expose herself.I guess perhaps the only thing that I really cared something about was the identity of Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite. Her whole deal and how every god/goddess out there defers to her was really hilarious to watch, and it was one of the highlights of the book that I bothered to tell my husband about.

Despite all that though, I'm still invested enough in the series overall to want to continue on this and will put the next installment on my TBR.

I am a little disappointed considering how great the first book was. Although this one wasn't bad, it didn't really feel like a story. It felt more like a filler episode of one of those procedurals. In fact, the book itself has three literal filler stories told by characters to fill time. It's not as if this is a very long book either. So it really made it feel like nothing happened at all. I have read 100 pages books with more story than this.

The characters were still great, although I might have gotten more out of the iron druid crossover if I had read any of those books. Gladys is amazing. So it's not as if this isn't well written or anything like that. It's just barely a story.