Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Ink Blood Sister Scribe

After hearing so much praise about this book and after looking forward to it all year, I felt sad that this novel felt so incomplete when I read it. Ink Blood Sister Scribe feels like the definition of potential unrealized: A book that feels as if it really had a big story to tell but instead it was a little story that felt immature and underdeveloped to me.

Author Emma Törzs isn’t without talent: The bones are there in her writing for truly great novels. Her ideas have such great potential, her imagery is vivid and provocative, her grasp of how to write magic systems is already well-developed, and her prose will be something to behold once she gets a full grasp on it.

Where this book falls short is pacing, plot development, character development, and I would call it “egalitarianism of character time on page”. The pacing is scattered all over the place, which makes reading it feel like a slipshod experience. The plot development is either not happening at all or it’s happening all at once, which is tied into the pacing problems. You have three “tent pole” characters holding this book up: Joanna, Esther, and Nicholas. Three (for all intents and purposes) main characters with their own POV’s that braid this story together, but I felt none of them were given their fair shake. Nicholas should’ve been introduced a bit earlier (I almost DNFd the book before he showed up because I wasn’t seeing a conflict in the book that interested me enough to keep going), Joanna wasn’t given enough to do throughout the book, and Esther was given too much. This uneven character development also affected the plot development.

No matter how I look at it, all of these issues cited in the paragraph above equate to a game of “The knee bone is connected to the…”, because they each affect one another whenever tweaked. This is what this book needed more of, though: Tweaking. Editing. It probably could’ve used some more workshopping and a few more readers to lay eyes on it. Törzs is potentially a blindingly brilliant writer, but this is her debut and all writers have to put their first book babies out into the world sometime. It’s obvious I didn’t enjoy it near as much as others did, but it’s not the first time that’s happened.

Magical realism is probably my favorite genre of novels, right up there with speculative fiction. We need more voices in the genre, especially diverse and female. I want Törzs to keep writing. I want her to take in the constructive things reviewers have to say and come back to us with a fantastic second novel. I want her to blow us away.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. My own personal policy as a reviewer dictates that books receiving a three star or lower rating do not have their reviews posted on any social media or bookseller websites.

File Under: Fantasy/General Fiction/LGBTQ Romance/Magical Realism/Paranormal Fantasy/Secret Society/Standalone Fantasy Novel/Urban Fantasy