#twelve bones

Hello and welcome to another reading year! Following the devastation Dark Heir cause in my heart at the end of 2023, I didn't really feel like reading much for about two weeks. I did catch up on a few manga series, most notably 8 volumes of Yona of the Dawn by Mizuho Kusanagi. While it's still very good, I think binge reading helped quite a bit to keep me invested. :'D After that, I read one book that will definitely go into my worst books of 2024. Refer to the later half of the post if you want to know more. Let's focus on the good ones first!

Cursebreakers (Madeleine Nakamura): This one was really good! I was positively surprised. The world is magical, not medieval but futuristic! The story around the conspiracy is interesting and intense and the main characters are difficult people that might be hard to like in real life but they complement each other so well and it's so nice to see their relationship grow (no love story here!). I also really liked the way it is told. The protagonist has bipolar disorder which is a huge factor in the story but he recounts the story from a later perspective, so rather than being right in the moment with every dramatic and sometimes questionable decision we get a little bit of distance and insight into his actions and thoughts which works really well.

Twelve Bones (Sixteen Souls 2) (Rosie Talbot): The first volume was a already a little dark but all the bad stuff involved a limited circle of people (most of them ghosts), this one takes a full dive into the swooping dark threatening the entire city, living and dead! The stakes, my dear. Ugh! Based on that I wouldn't call it fun ... would I? I liked reading it, though! The cast of characters is really endearing. The story is good. The struggle felt warranted. The ending is kinda mangaesque but I like manga, so I don't mind. xD I wonder if there'll be a third volume. If not, I'll look forward to the author's next work. :)

The Necromancer's Light (Radiance 1) (Tavia Lark): I picked up the set of the trilogy which has a much better cover than the indivual books. :'D This one is very simple and straightforward, it's cute. The characters are likable. The hurt/comfort in here is indeed comforting. I think I like the first part with the pining best. This story's animal is a horse! (I read half of the auther's Perilous Courts series and there's friendly animals in every volume there as well. Nice touch.)

And now for the first book of 2024 I did not like. Heir to Thorn and Flame (Court of Broken Bonds 1) (Ben Alderson): I read the author's self-published Darkmourn series last summer and quite liked it despite its issues with the writing. Now this one has a tradtional publisher so I wanted to know if that made any difference. On a whole, the writing feels a little bit smoother than Darkmourn. But it's still long, repetetive, and tries to hard to sound fancy by exaggerating a lot. The premise of the story isn't even that bad. Boy finds out he has magic, accidentely kills the prince, has to take his place and political stuff occurs with two countries on the cusp of war over him and his magic. The first thing that annoyed me: The story feels unnecessarily cruel. It literally starts out with attempted rape which is already the second time protagonist Maxiumus is assaulted in his life. People are killed right in front of him, he is forced to shoot someone he cares for. People violently dig through his memories and still don't believe his story afterwards. And the villains are just caricatures. They have the balding hair, yellowed teeth, bony fingers, stinky breath, and leering eyes. They're ugly and evil! It was so over the top that I couldn't care at all. The other characters have nothing going on for them either. I don't like Maximus at all. He's whiny and indecisive and only worries about his parents. He does have that superstrong magic he uses to rip people apart when he's angry, wow. He also has two love interests and I don't see the chemistry with either of them (I suppose it tries to be Slow Burn but not very good). But they're so good-looking, the strong arms and nice smell, so tall! (eyeroll) The second one of these guys is named Simion. He's the only one remotely nice to him in the beginning, so Maximus likes him. Then he hates him. Then he likes him, then Simion reveals stuff and Maximus hates him again (even though he's just the messenger). But then he's suddenly attracted to him again to the point they even kiss … but oh no, Maximus can't kiss anyone, because he is married to the other guy by magic (against his will)!! And everyone treats it as this big thing "oh old magic you are bound to each other now for life" etc, but nobody explains what the handfastening (as they call it) even does for 80% of the book! Until Maximus kisses Simion and the magic causes him pain because he's cheating!!

Here my mind went on a tangent. The magic seems to have a conscious in this story, alright, but I want to know it's moral values then. Does it only detect kisses and sex? Physical acts? Can it differentiate between consensual und non-consensual? Who is doing the touching? Does is only clock sexual attraction or romantic attraction as well? What if he has a crush and never acts on it? Would it still cause him permament pain? What's with platonical kisses? Now you ask, do we have to explain all of this in a book like this? No, we don't (there's also two sequels), but I sure hope the author thought about it when he introduced a complex thing like this. Oh, also Simion forces his way into Maximus's mind via telepathy several times. Such a nice way to get to know each other. And speaking of the morality of the magic, it counts how many people are killed with it. On the wand. As tally marks. How does it know? Why does it only count humans, not animals? Why does it care?

Two more things I found annoying (there's more, but this is long enough already): First, the parents. Everything happening in the story hinges on their whereabouts, it's back and forth and very tiring. The Red King has them so Maximus has to stay with him, then the Blue Prince has them, then they get kidnapped so Maximus follows, then it turns out they've never been kidnapped and the Blue Prince kept them all along! In between he freaks out over his father not being his father and when they're reunited, but before they can talk, the father dies. Yay. Tragic. Not. The same thing happened before already. The one lady Maximus was forced to kill? She survived! She was saved and he goes to meet her, they talk for 30 seconds and then she's eaten by a dragon. :D I was pissed for wasting my time.