Review: The Tenets in the Tattoos

The Tenets in the Tattoos by Becky James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was a bit dubious when I encountered a word (not a made-up name, but an English word) with two apostrophes in it while reading the sample, but the rest of the copy editing didn't seem terrible, so I took a chance. "OK," I thought, "here's an arrogant guy who is clearly going to be taken down a peg; he'll have to deal with getting to know and appreciate the other half of his soul, that could be played quite well as a metaphor for getting to know your shadow side or whatever, and like a romance only different; it's set in Generic Fantasyland, but the idea of the soul companion is interesting. I'll give it a try."

Things started to go sideways, though, when the protagonist reverse-portaled into our world and instantly became an unbelievable naive idiot. He saw a bicycle, correctly identified it as a "device," then shortly afterwards referred to it as a "creature," for example. Then the plot, which had been stumbling along happily enough as a character-driven story, took a very abrupt turn for the political/dystopic/tragic, and at that point I was out. The worldbuilding wasn't working for me, the book didn't seem to know what it wanted to be, and I just wasn't confident that the author had the chops to pull off an enjoyable and well-constructed novel.

I'm giving it three stars on the principle of "benefit of the doubt".

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