gocat

I first encountered Gratton through The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories. She's one of the Merry Fates along with Maggie Stiefvater (adore), and Brenna Yovanoff (ditto). They share a poetic writing style, a love of paranormal stories and a penchant for darkness. Two of my favorite stories in the collection were Gratton's, so I was pumped to read one of her novels. I think Gratton has loads of potential, but she didn't quite hit the mark with me in this one. This is the story of Silla, a blood witch recently orphaned in the apparent murder-suicide of her parents. She's determined to prove despite all rational evidence that her father didn't kill her mother then himself. Her only family left is her older brother, Reese, who's also struggling in the wake of the murders. There's a mysterious magic book, a very old and very powerful villain, lots of blood, family secrets, and insta-love with the new boy-next-door Nick. I didn’t like the Silla/Nick instalove. I didn't like that the side characters seemed at the edges of being developed but always felt slightly hollow. I didn't like how often the POVs switched back and forth between Silla and Nick. It was distracting. There was even a third perspective (old-timey diary entries). I didn't like that the moral questions felt to me a bit underdeveloped. Like Silla freaks out and kills a rabbit – for no purpose. Seriously, she’s like “I need blood! I know! Bunny!” and she kills it and then doesn’t do anything with the blood. Killing animals for magic seems wrong – although it really is no worse than killing them for food, as long as it’s quick – but doing it without purpose or a plan or brains? It just seems childish and frankly a little scary that her first response is to kill something when she didn’t have to. And she never killed an animal again! Even in the climactic showdown with the Big Bad! So what was the point? BUT I think Gratton has potential in the horror-fantasy realm of things. The Big Bad can possess people, and the paranoia of not knowing who could be possessed was well-played and nail-biting. The Big Bad could take over anyone, and you wouldn’t know it until it was (almost) too late. The blood magic system was also really pretty cool. Good worldbuilding by Gratton here. And even if she didn't explore the moral questions as deeply as I'd like, I appreciated how much moral ambiguity there was in this novel. Two more plot-heavy points that bothered me, under the spoiler tag: (view spoiler)

2022-12-07 10:28