Blood Song Review

Paperback, 624 Pages
Adult/ Epic Fantasy
By: Anthony Ryan
Rating: 🌟🌟

“A fool is any man who doesn’t think he’s a fool.”

I was super excited for this book, I got myself a paperback and kept pushing reading it till I was in the perfect mood. I was so sure I was gonna love it given the rave reviews it got and all the positive things my friends said about it. The book has 80K+ ratings and an average rating of 4.4 and those are mind-blowing numbers and I was mind blown by the fact that it did not work out for me as much as I wanted it to.

In theory there is much to love about this book. We are told the story by the main character himself toward the end of his life as he is recalling everything that happened from his childhood leading to that point. There is a school featuring a bunch of classmates and teachers and there is a bit of magic involved and those are all things that I really really like. I am sad that it was a bit bland for me and I felt there is something missing the whole time.

The writing is weird for me because it swings between boring to average to brilliant but the pacing was slow specially in the middle part which made this feel like a chore at some points. Vaelin the protagonist is a Gary Stu and I don’t mind that because it could be done well but I am not much convinced with this series. The secondary characters had much more potential to be unique and memorable but I can’t say that I felt that. I think much of my dismay with the narrative is due to mediocre characterization.

The world building is okay and I know it will be better but I wanted to see more of the magic and I had the idea that it is kind of a magic school story but that’s not really the case here. The worst thing is that people who loved this said that the next two books are certainly not as good and may even be considered bad which solidifies my decision of DNFing the series at this point. I will be trying Ryan’s other series but simply put, this one was not for me.