Blood and Flame by Brendan CorbettMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A decently done sword-and-sorcery fantasy in many ways, marred by serious mechanical issues, but with a more original world than some I've seen. However, it's also not completely to my taste, being more dystopian and darker than I personally prefer.
The author has a bad dangling-modifier habit, sometimes leaves the past perfect tense out of sentences that really need it, occasionally chooses a word that doesn't quite have the right connotation for the context (or just sounds similar to the word he means) or uses the wrong preposition in an idiom, and makes several other common errors, like hyphenating an adjective and its noun. As always with books I get for review via Netgalley, I must note that I haven't seen the final published version, and there may yet be more editing to come, though there's a lot to work on.
The author is also one of those people who likes to use other words as alternatives to "said," and chooses some odd ones, including "drolled" (probably by mistake for "drawled"), "cut" (not "cut in," just "cut") and "spewed". He repeatedly says "at the aft" when he just means "aft" or "at the stern." A quirk I've seen elsewhere, but never so much, is that he misses the "-ed" ending off some short verbs that end in "t" when putting them in the past tense. I've often seen "spit" used as the past tense instead of "spat" and "grit" instead of "gritted" (as in teeth), and have put it down to a dialectal variation, but I don't believe I've seen "flit" or "jut" or "rest" used this way before.
Add this to the frequent lack of past perfect tense when referring to something that happened before the narrative moment, and the author's habit of using the phrasing "X did A when Y did B" when it should be "X was doing A" or "X had done A," and it becomes challenging at times to parse how the action is taking place in time in order to envisage the action. Point of view also tends to wander sometimes between the two main characters within the same scene.
These issues aren't on every page, by any means, but when they do appear, they distract from what is a decent story about engaging characters. Certainly, there's nothing here that is completely unexpected, though the worldbuilding shows some originality. Monsters, even if they have familiar names like "Jackals" and "Sirens" (all species names, including "Humans," are capitalized for some reason), aren't what you're expecting from those names, and aren't just an existing monster under a new label, either. The humans (or Humans, if you insist) are vegan, while the Fae aren't, which is a low-level conflict between people of those two origins; although there is a leather gauntlet early on, I think that's just a slip, since it's described as "cloth" a couple of sentences later.
The church is dystopian, because of course it is, though unlike most real corrupted religious organizations it doesn't seem to go in for large-scale sexual abuse, thankfully. Or if it does, the characters we follow don't encounter it. It mostly just lies about history and commits ethnic cleansing. (view spoiler) I don't like dystopian, so that took my overall enjoyment down a little, along with the gory tragic battles.
On balance, while it showed potential and some originality, it wasn't quite the kind of story I love, and the many language issues were a big distraction for me. Those factors combine to take it down to a three-star rating, and keep it off my recommendation list for 2025. It was good enough that I finished it, but not so good that I'd read another.
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