**This review may contain spoilers**
I am always willing to give new books a shot. Recommendations are always incredibly welcome, and more often than not, I thoroughly enjoy what has been sent my way. I have read a ton of books that have been recommended to me by friends or even just strangers on the internet, and so far, I’ve had good luck with them (which I’m super grateful for). It seems like my luck had to run out eventually, though, because I read From Blood And Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout and absolutely despised it.
I might be a little dramatic, but saying I disliked the book just feels like a severe understatement. There are so many things I could pick out that just rubbed me the wrong way, but let’s start with a glaring one. The fantasy genre has a severe issue of pairing 18-year-old girls with 200+ year old men, and From Blood And Ash does not shy away from this concept at all. If anything, it strongly embraces what I find to be a really disgusting dynamic. Not to mention, the older individual typically has a substantial amount of power to hold over the younger one. The dynamic between the “couple” in this book just feels wrong from every single standpoint, but the power dynamics and age gap do not help vouch for it in any way.
On top of all this, the main character, Penellaphe “Poppy” Balfour, is not very likable. Poppy is the Maiden, which basically means she’s the role model of the kingdom she’s in. She doesn’t have a lot of freedom, and is understandably frustrated with the position she’s in. Armentrout’s presumable goal with writing Poppy was to make her this independent individual who can handle things on her own. More often than not, however, she needs other people’s help and comes off as incredibly stubborn and frustrating when she won’t take the help offered, which just makes the story hard to follow and a struggle to get through at times. She also continuously describes the romantic interest by his looks, repeatedly reminding the audience of his amber eyes and flowing black hair. It just got very annoying for me to have to read a main character I genuinely didn’t like.
My last issue had to do with the writing style itself. I don’t want to pick at this too much, as everyone’s writing style varies and saying it was awful just isn’t true. It wasn’t up to par with my personal expectations, and that’s okay. There were a lot of ellipses and pauses that felt wholly unnecessary, and conversations didn’t flow very smoothly between characters. With that being said, it’s all based on my personal standard of what I enjoy in books. What I dislike may be what other people enjoy, and that is beyond okay.
Something I did enjoy about the book was Vikter, one of Poppy’s personal guards who acts as a fatherly figure to her. His characterization wasn’t incredibly thorough, but when he did appear, he was patient and had faith in Poppy and her development. It was nice to see him on page, and I wish he had shown up more than he did.
Overall, I gave this book a 2.5 star rating out of 5. The characters were difficult to like, I personally didn’t enjoy the writing style, and the world-building (which I didn’t mention, but was something else I had a slight issue with) wasn’t the most consistent. It could be difficult to follow at times, and for as hyped up as From Blood And Ash was, my expectations were significantly higher. On one hand, it was a decent fantasy novel, but the amount of weak tropes utilized made me less than satisfied with my reading experience. My only hope is that the books I read going forward prove to be at least a little more enjoyable than Armentrout’s From Blood And Ash.