The Bone Shard Daughter Review

Ebook, 448 Pages
Adult/ Fantasy
By: Andrea Stewart
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/4

“When a shark offers up a pearl, be wary of its teeth.”

The Bone Shard Daughter is a book that I have heard a lot of things about from people I trust and that’s why I decided to pick it up as my October book of the month for my book club! I am glad I did so because it definitely was an interesting read.

The story has multiple POV including: Lin, daughter of the emperor who has memory loss and she wants to learn the shard magic but the emperor doesn’t want to teach her until she gets her memories. Jovis, a smuggler working against the empire and trying to find his lost wife. Ranami and Phalue who are dating and are part of the rebels. Finally we have Sand, a minor POV that is quite vague!

I always try to find the positive things in books and there is usually something that stands out in every book and in this one, I thought it is how easy going into it was! Usually adult fantasy books start with info dump and gets more interesting as we progress through the story but this was simply very easy to get into from the first chapter. I was definitely confused and that’s normal but it was gripping from the first few pages. Other things I liked about the writings are the smooth transition between the different POV and how we had first and third person POV and it was so slick that I did not notice it until like halfway through the book. I also enjoyed the mini cliffhangers at the end of each chapter that made me want to continue jumping between the POVs to know what happens next!

“A person who can’t see a future doesn’t have a future”

The characters were very well written and each character was unique in their own way. I loved how they all develop through the story. I talked about their roles above and I need to mention Mephi, Jovis companion through the story and it was just super cute! I love how Jovis was so protective of it. And then there are the constructs which are weird creatures created by the king and controlled by the shard magic and imo, I think they were the most intriguing part about this story!

The magic system is not very complicated, it basically reminded me of a programming language, you write commands into bone shards and insert them into the constructs! I have said a similar thing about the magic system in Foundryside and I did get the same vibes from both novels but each in its unique way!

The pacing was slow at first and then it gets faster later in the book, the last 25% were crazy awesome with all the plot twists and reveals and everything fell into place which made them my favorite part and which increased my rating of this story to above 4 stars!

“I would drink a thousand lies just to see your face again.”

Summary: I think Orbit is doing a great job in picking all these talented authors works! I did not feel that this was a debut at all because it shows writing experience from the writing style to the characters and the world-building! I definitely am continuing the series and looking forward to book 2 already!