Review: The Bloodline Feud (The Merchant Princes, #1-2)
By EricMesa
- 2 minutes read - 287 words
The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was a free giveaway for Tor’s ebook club
This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was mostly around the way Stross writes his dialogue. I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is about it, but it just didn’t do it for me.
The plot twists were pretty good.
I’m never a huge fan of chapters where we don’t know WTF is going on and everyone’s being all cryptic. There were a few of those here. I’d rather either we know a lot more than the protagonists or know only what they know. But it wasn’t too hard to eventually figure out what was going on.
I did enjoy the universe building he did. It definitely felt as though he was one of those authors who builds out whole towns and economies we never see in the book, just to make sure he’s being thorough.
Not too much else to say. I did enjoy our protagonist being a literal kick-ass woman. I thought the journalist trope worked well for her as it gave her a reason to have good deductive reasoning skills around what was going on as well as a way of getting information out of people. She was, however, THIRSTY AF! I don’t ever think I’ve read a book with someone so constantly sprung outside of the strange, semi-erotica of Vagina Mundi. While it’s never explicit (that I can remember), you definitely know what’s up when she’s with her beau (pun intended).