This is epic fantasy at its finest! “The Bone Shard Daughter” is packed with intrigue, action, a delightfully fresh (and kinda terrifying) magic system, and plenty of twisty plot points to keep the pages flying by. I can’t wait to see what happens next! ( )

This felt too formulaic, though the details are new. Perhaps this is a sign of poor character development? ( )

While I really enjoyed the story and the imagination in this one, it just didn't feel like it had enough depth for me. The characters are all very interesting, but I didn't get to know any one of them as well as I needed to in order to feel invested in their story, because I was constantly torn from one POV to the next before I really got invested in any ONE pov. Additionally, I never had a solid grasp of time in this one, so it was hard to follow the "when" of the story, which made any sort of clarity much more muddled.

It was solid enough to make me want to read book two. But not solid enough to make me think: damn, my friends should read this book. ( )

UPDATE 23/12/2021 - Hmmm. I did not love this as much the second time around. The second half was infinitely better than the first! I'm going to have to change my rating to 4 Stars on reread. (Update on update) Nope that doesn't quite feel right. I'm going for 4.5 Stars rounded up to 5. I just love the characters and world too much to give it any less. However, I think because I knew all the big reveals it impacted my reread.

UPDATE 21/12/2021 - Rereading in preparation to read book 2!

Well that was, quite frankly, superb!

A masterclass in world building with a complex and fascinating magical system. The characters were totally engaging, fully developed, endearing, and I felt emotionally invested in their journeys. The story itself was enthralling and the different threads of the plot were seamlessly woven together.

I need to know more. More about the world. More about the magic. More about the incredible creatures. Just. MORE!

Love love loved it! ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: yes.

Audio Narration
There are multiple narrators: Natalie Naudus, Feodor Chin, and Emily Woo Zeller. I’m not sure which name went with which voice, but I liked the two narrators who voiced the Lin and Jovis POV’s best. The one who voiced both Phalue and Ranami was mostly ok, but her voicing of male characters sometimes sounded cartoonish to my ears. That was my only complaint though; I found this audiobook easy to listen to.

I’ve complained in the past about multi-narrator audiobooks being distracting because you have different voices for the same characters. This one didn’t bother me much, I think because the characters were mostly separate. The two characters who were together most often, Phalue and Ranami, were voiced by the same person.

Story
The story follows a few different characters as they navigate lives full of unknowns in pursuit of different goals. Lin probably gets the most page time, and she’s the character referred to by the title. She’s the daughter of the emperor, a man who uses bone shards extracted from children to make “constructs”. Commands that the construct must obey are carved into bone shards and placed inside them to govern their behavior. When a bone shard is used in a construct, it causes the person the bone came from to sicken and die sooner than they would have otherwise. Something happened to Lin a few years ago that caused her to lose her memories. She’s trying to prove herself to her father, wanting to be a better emperor than he is, but he doubts her ability to be his heir. Another main POV character, Jovis, turned to smuggling to fund his search for his stolen wife, but he keeps getting sidetracked with helping people he didn’t intend to help despite his best (or worst) intentions. He’s befriended by a strange creature that’s definitely not a kitten. Phalue is a governor’s daughter who’s in love with a low-born woman who wants to see a revolution. And Sand is picking mangoes every day, with no idea why she’s doing it or how she ended up on the island she lives on.

I felt invested in all the characters. I enjoyed Lin’s chapters and her discoveries the most. Jovis and his unique companion were a close second. I was also really interested in Sand’s part of the story, although there was very little time devoted to it. The parts with Phalue and Ranami felt a little tedious to me in the beginning, I think because they lacked the mystery that the other sections had, but they got more interesting later in the book.

I liked the constant questions about what was really going on, and things didn’t always turn out the way I expected. There were a few things that surprised me and a few that didn’t. The bone shard/construct magic was unique in my experience. It didn’t always make perfect sense, but it seemed to be thought out well enough that I could suspend my disbelief. It reminded me of computer programming the one time we got a deeper look at how it worked, and I liked that aspect of it. There were a few things I wasn’t clear about, but it’s also likely I missed things I would have caught if I’d read it in print.

The chapters tend to end in a cliff hanger, so it’s one of those books where at the end of each chapter you’re going “no, don’t stop there!” and then you realize you’re finally going to find out what happened next in another POV’s story that you hadn’t wanted to end a while back so then you decide it’s all ok after all. At least, that’s how I tend to react to that format. I know it annoys some people, but I often enjoy it.

There are lots of questions throughout the book, and we get several answers by the end, but a lot of questions are still open. Likewise, the general plot threads reach some sort of resolution, but they also reach a turning point that clearly leads to the next book in the series. I would very much like to read the full series in print at some point. I’m rating it at 4.5 stars and rounding down to 4 on Goodreads. ( )