CW: violence, some gore, some others

Read via NetGalley.

Sometimes, unfortunately, a book can have all the bells and whistles but absolutely no soul to bring it to life. Such is this case with this one.

Normally I’d include a little blurb about the book here to give you an idea what the story is about, but I don’t really know what to say about this one. Set about 20 years after the Spanish incursion into Mexico, the story takes place in an alternate history, aligning some of the information we have today about that period with an imagining of what things could have been if Spain had been less successful and if magic was real. The book is *marketed* as a ‘swashbuckling’ adventure, a reimagining of Zorro, full of adventure, intrigue, romance, and magic. In actuality, there are no pirates, very little actual sword fighting, and a barely developed ‘romance’ with no pull. ‘Intrigue’ feels like a generous term for a confusing, lackluster plot. The marketing was great; the execution was not.

My biggest issue with the book is not the worldbuilding. The author seems to have drawn heavily on both the mythology and the history of the area, and it was really interesting to see what bits and pieces I could pick up on from what I remember learning in school and marrying that with what the author’s devised for the overall plot. There’s a lot of material in the story, and it should have made for a really vibrant backdrop. Unfortunately, perhaps due to how the information was laid out, it instead became a somewhat jumbled mess. I felt like I spent a large portion of the first half just trying to figure out the context and the magic. I’m still not entirely sure I know what was going on, and I think a lot of that comes from the lack of explanation.

My biggest issue also isn’t with the characters. That’s not to say I don’t have a problem with the characters. That particular problem is because all of them feel incredibly flat. It’s not unusual for side characters to sometimes come off as a little 2-dimensional; they’re not the focus, and making characters that stand out when, by definition, they have a less critical role isn’t easy. But even the main character, Leonora, came across as completely uninteresting. She should be amazing— she’s a shapeshifting vigilante with a magical sword. That should be top marks in my personal heroine rankings. Instead I found that she just lacked any realness; if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought the story was about someone else that we hadn’t met yet, and that Leonora was just a random character in a prologue. She effectively does nothing for the vast majority of the book, and there’s so little character growth in her until the absolute end that she became almost unlikable.

This leads into what was really my biggest issue with the book: it felt flat. Bare boned, like it was just the rough draft and it was waiting on that special spark to bring the whole thing off the page. I found that I didn’t really care how it ended, or what happened to Leonora, or how she got to wherever she was going to end up. The plot didn’t start to take off until the last roughly 15% of the book, but by that point everything else had felt so ‘blah’ and confusing that even the interesting, engaging bits were only okay.

At the end of the day, what should have been an immensely interesting, rich, enthralling story ended up, for me, being completely unremarkable. The worldbuilding was jumbled, chaotic, and inefficient, the characters were flat and uninteresting, and the plot itself was slow, unclear, and unimpressive. I hate that this one was such a dud, because I was really excited by the overall premise. Unfortunately, it just didn’t quite hit the mark.

Sun of Blood and Ruin - Likewise Book Reviews

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