Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn Book Review (Part 2, the remix, the redo, the re-up, the redox reaction)

Rating: 1 out of 5 bastards

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It's the Dastardly December Double Feature! (A.k.a. me and Perihelion both read this book and we had so much to say we decided to hit ‘em with the royal rumble tag team and we're about to let Hulkmania run wild brother) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scions! And Vassals! And Senschals! Oh my! Mages And Kingsmages And Merlins! Oh my! Aether And Root And Rites! Oh my! That's what reading this book feels like. Roll summary. Summary Bloodmarked is the 2022 sequel novel to Legendborn by Tracy Deonn. If you wanna read my Legendborn review, look no further. I said some things there. And basically what I said there is what I said here. I added some stuff though, don't you worry. So, after the events of Legendborn, in which Bree learned she was descended from King Arthur and gained magic and pulled Excalibur from the stone and all that good shit, she's back to do more. Namely, the book ended with Nick missing and everything gone to shit. Bloodmarked picks up immediately where it left off with Bree trying her best to get in on the action to save Nick. Her best is kinda a 67- percent attempt but we'll bump that up to a C for effort. Along the way she has some romance with Selwyn, finds more confusing magic and meets another black person finally but oops it turns out he isn't even human. Review This book is a true lesson is why “show don't tell” became a somewhat standard rule. Unfortunately, people said “show don't tell” so much that folks got tired of it. That's another issue for another day- I'll write a grandiose essay on catchall advice one day. Anyway. This books tells you everything. Every single thing. It takes 5 sentences to describe mundane actions. It takes pages to infodump everything that happened last book. The characters speak in dialogues like people reciting Shakespearean sonnets to each other. The telling is off the charts in this book. Like look at this page where William speaks.

He is not a character. Or if he is a character, he is a npc (non-player character in a video game). He exists solely for Bree to run up and interact with him. He hands her a quest and she sprints off to kill 15 wolfsmagescionvassalsenschals so she can get the hairs from their tail for William the npc healer to make 1 potion. But no really. He seems to exist solely to drop these Wikipedia plot summaries to her. Every page of this book goes something like this:

William: The Aether Kingsmage Merlin Vassal Table Root Rites Order. Bree: How can we find Nick? I miss him. Missing him hurts. My heart hurts. Last book I slept next to Nick now he's gone. The aether kingsmage root scion burns in my heart for Nick. I need to connect to the Arthur within to navigate this racist society to find Nick. Arthur is possessing me not unlike some poltergeist. Selwyn used a word I don't know. I wonder what it means. He often uses words I don't know because he's Welsh. I file away the word he uses for later. Ah, the kingsmage scion merlin root rite aether seneschal is rude to me. How can I navigate my root Arthur scion kingsmage vassal seneschal? Like. I can only take so much of this. As I said in my first review...it's kind of impressive to have a book with this much exposition that leaves you more confused than where you start. All this exposition, yet I'm still left wondering if I need to draw a diagram so I can figure out what the hell is going on with this magic system. The only thing this book did even slightly right was the monster/beast fight scenes. I, at least, could lose myself in those for a moment and allow myself to get excited with the action. But then, immediately after the fight, the exposition would pick up again. Even romance wasn't free from this. Not that I wanted to read romance between Bree and this vaguely racist jerk, but even a simple romantic scene wasn't free of exposition.

[Ice spice voice] Like. Human people do not speak like this. They are literally having a closely romantic scene and are speaking like they are teaching a summer camp troop about the types of trees in a forest. "Unpack the present". Bruh shut up. Every. Goddamn. Scene. Is. Like. This. A character does something. Another character says, in dialogue, for a whole paragraph, why the person just did what they did. As if we readers couldn't glean it on our own. Books like this are so very frustrating. Because they don't trust the reader to figure anything out. Or rather. They expect the reader to keep up with 26 different random magic terms, but then want to explain the smallest actions of every character to the reader. It comes off as weird and like a distinct lack of trust for readers to possess even the slightest lack of nuance to figure shit out. That connects to the racism present in the books. It's so overt. You never see any intentionally placed, subtle racism anywhere. For example. Sel is racist. He's very indicative of that subtle racism that occurs very frequently in our world. The extreme anger he feels at her presence in the first book and the way he treats her...this is not something that I find romantic. But the author definitely did not mean for Sel to be racist. Otherwise, she probably wouldn't have Sel and Bree getting together in any manner if that was the case. Plus, all the racism in this book is written with flashing signals, spotlight on it. A character walks up to Bree and just is like. Hey you look dirty. Your hair. Dirty. Yes you. Yes that hair. That afro. DIRTY. Not to say blatant racism doesn’t happen in our world. It’s just more commonly, in real life at least, a lot less overt. Yes, I live in the south. If a white person wants to call me dirty, they not bold enough to say shit to my face. They're gonna be subtle with it. They're gonna look disdained at something I just touched, they're gonna glare at me a little. Standoffish, rude. They just usually aren't getting big and bad enough to walk up to me and say: Hey Peachy your hair looks dirty. This lack of subtle racism in the book takes me out of the immersion because, it's clear this author wants this to be a very grandiose treatise of What It Means To Be Black In White Spaces. Also, the scene in Clayton, Georgia where random rednecks say things like: "You one of them goth kids???!!" with derision took me out. As a black person who has spent many years in white spaces, none of this book rings very true. And frankly...this book just don't make no gatdam sense. Look at this page.

Let's go through this page as a class. 1. "Gabriel temples his fingers" he what now? Do you mean...steeples his fingers? Like. The phrase is steeples/steepled. Because, your fingers look like a steeple. Like this. Just a little more fingertips touching.

Temples don't have a defined shape therefore he coulda made his fingers look like this.

That'd be pretty lit, but I don't think that's what she meant. 2. Root furnace. 3. They gave her a serum...that worked on her DNA. It went in her and modified her DNA. Because that's...science. Bree is about to turn into the primordial ooze from where all life came from in about two seconds. Like. Just every page of this book looks like this. I could sit here and review every page of this book and just keep saying the same things. Like the book does. So, I’ll attempt to end right here. If you want to take nothing else from this review, take this: This is a really tough book to review. Because with books like this. I see the vision. I see the spark of something where, if the author had just trusted the audience, or done a little more research, or...become a better writer, they could've had something. The main issue here is this book wants to be too many things, everything, everywhere, all at once. Which could work in the hands of a more skilled writer. Genre bending, and mixing and matching tropes and types worked very well in eeaao. It works very well in other fantasy novels. It does not here. I also really don’t care to down black women or any woc, despite what one may think from my reading log. I read these books, because I hope to find something good in a recent flock of books that claim to represent me. Unfortunately, all I find is some shit. Wait. Wait... who...Who's that?

It's STONE COLD BREE AUSTIN AND SHES ABOUT TO LET HULKMANIA RUN WILD IN THIS ARENA

No really. Why did she suplex Alice like this. Hit her with the ddt. The rock bottom. Stone cold stunnered her ass. Though I gotta admit I cracked up a lil. Ok I’m done. This book wants to be a lot of things. It wants to be a fun urban fantasy, while also being a dark look at grief, while also being a grim fantasy, while also solving racism in America, while also being a treatise on generational trauma, while also being a spy thriller, all while being set at the University of North Carolina. With trying to split itself down all these lines, it accomplishes none of them. I just. I see people say this book is some brilliant look at racism and grief and I wish this book was the one they're imagining in their head. But it isn't. This book is clunky and not very well written. Deeply unfortunate. I give this book 1 modified DNA strand out of 5 non- black friends that can somehow braid natural black hair. There's a vision here, but it's lost under messy worldbuilding, a flat mc, ugly white men, and a sea of exposition.