The Bone Shard Daughter

I was recommended this book by a friend and decided to take a chance. I will admit that i wasn’t the biggest fan, it felt like it had been years when I finished it, and although the ending was quite interesting, I don’t plan on continuing with the series. The whole book seemed to drag on, and I was extremely bored at certain points. I understand why many people would like this book, it just wasn’t for me.

The story jumped between six perspectives, and because of this, it took until the very end of the book for it to actually get interesting. My favourite ones were Jovis, the smuggler, and Lin, the emperor’s daughter. Their stories made sense, and I didn’t find myself getting overly confused when reading them, as well as finding them better purely because the characters were enjoyable to read about.

The world this book is set in is extremely well written and I think would be more enjoyable to read if the characters themselves were more interesting, and in some cases, less annoying. For example, Phalue, the daughter of the Governor of one of the islands. She was quite irritating and whenever I reached one of her chapters, I got through it as fast as possible because everything written in them was just so boring.

However, despite not enjoying the book for the majority of the time I was reading it, there was a few good aspects I’d like to write about. One of these is Jovis’ pet, Mephi. He joined Jovis after the Deerhead island had sunk and got onto his boat, refusing to leave. Even after finishing the book, I’m not sure what he actually is, but I’m sure that would be explained in the next book if I chose to read it, which I’m not going to.

Lin and Bayan’s relationship also intrigued me, and I would have enjoyed the story more if it was only focused on that. Honestly, I would have preferred if the entire book was just Lin’s perspective, because I felt it was the most developed out of all of them and it was the easiest to follow, some of the others didn’t make much sense.

I also liked the brief chapters from the point of view of a character called sand, who I learned to suspect was either the Emperors old wife, or Jovis’ old girlfriend. Either way, I looked forward to those chapters as I enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on and why all the islanders with her had lost their memory.

The constructs were quite fun to read about and I liked how they were described as well as the mechanics behind them. Lin and Bayan’s experiments with them were also interesting, especially considering the plot twist towards the end of the book. The idea that the Emperor ran the land mostly through these false creature created out of the bones of citizens, felt quite spooky, yet it showed how corrupt the world in this story is. However, if the Emperor took years to master the craft of creating constructs, I’m a little confused as to how Lin found it so easy and learnt so fast, giving her the ability to successfully manipulate them to do her bidding.

Lin and Bayan being constructs really shocked me as I hadn’t suspected it earlier, although I think maybe I should have done. If I had paid more interest in the book I think I would have clocked earlier, but as I’ve said before, I was almost always bored when reading this book.

Overall, despite mentioning a few better points of the story, I just didn’t really like this book. I recognise it is well written and understand why others would really enjoy it, but it wasn’t for me. It took me just over a month to finish, which is much more time than I have taken for any other book, and I read other books during that time period because I couldn’t find the motivation to pick this one up and slowly make my way through another chapter.

★★★