Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’ll be reviewing The Blood of Whisperers by Devin Madson. This is the first book of The Vengeance Trilogy. Click here for more information on this series and upcoming releases from this author. This review has spoilers.
Summary
Imperial Expanse of Kisia. Sixteen years later. Emperor Lan is dead. Empress Li is dead. Their children are dead. Now, Tianto, the late emperor’s only surviving brother, is Emperor Tianto and his son, Katashi, is his heir. However, in less than a year, the new emperor is accused of having conspired to kill his brother and is sentenced to death for treason. His children are exiled. And General Kin, now Emperor Kin, has annihilated the Otako imperial family. As leader of the rebellion, he has sought to eliminate the empire’s greatest enemy: the emperor and his family. Unbeknownst to him, however, Prince Takehiko, now Endymion, and Princess Hana, Emperor Lan and Empress Li’s youngest children, are still alive.
Emperor Kin Ts’ai, the first of his name, is the Usurper and his empire is on the verge of civil war, divided between those who follow him and those who want an Otako back on the Crimson Throne. Katashi Otako, now known simply as “The Monarch” and leader of the Pikes, is preparing to avenge his father’s death. And to do that, he has come back to Kisia seeking to steal the Hian Crown from the Imperial Palace, for whoever wears the crown and swears the Imperial Oath, a ceremony that occurs once every year, is Emperor of Kisia. Hence, he has allied himself and his Pikes with the Vices, who will help him infiltrate the palace. But their leader, Malice, has his own agenda. He has given command of his Vices to a young girl who has a different mission once the Vices are inside the palace.
Elsewhere, Endymion is traveling back to Kisia with his mentor in search of who he is. In Kisia, however, he is imprisoned, tortured, branded a traitor, and then exiled.
My Thoughts About The Book
This is how Endymion’s story begins after we last see him as a young boy at the end of In Shadows We Fall. However, when the story begins in Blood of Whisperers not much background is given about the sixteen years in between the previous book and this one, and it took me a little bit to get my bearings. In the first chapter, for example, Endymion is returning to Kisia with the priest, whom we met at the end of In Shadows We Fall; we know from the prequel novella that Endymion is an empath as well, something that we get to see here too. However, we are never told how Empathy works in this or any of the subsequent books and it took me several chapters to understand that the italics in the text was him feeling other people’s emotions and or hearing their thoughts. Not knowing that made for some serious confusion at first. It seems obvious now, and I feel a little silly not having made the connection sooner, but I didn’t. And I was very confused at the beginning.
In the next chapter, I had a similar problem. Again with Empathy. It is Hana’s chapter and she’s commanding the Vices. Who are the Vices? What are the Vices? It is never explained. There is no backstory, and I think this would have helped me understand a little bit sooner that the Vices were human manifestations of Anger, Perjury, Hope, Pride, etcetera, and that Malice, the Vices’ leader, was a Vice himself. Hana’s perspective in this chapter is flawed, and I was still a bit confused about what was going on at this point because there is no backstory. The reader has to figure it out as they go, and at times it gave me the impression that the author assumed we knew all that information already…except we didn’t.
Through Hana we meet Katashi, and I will go so far as to say that he is the protagonist. His is the quest for vengeance. And that desire burns his soul. I did not expect Katashi to be the protagonist. I thought it was Endymion, but it isn’t. Katashi is the most full-fledged of the characters, and the one whose emotions just pour out of him; the author did a very good job writing him. Vengeance or the need for it makes him do things someone who does not want revenge would never think of and I never knew what to expect from him. I liked that.
“The gods say that a man is made the way he is for a purpose, and to seek to alter that is -“
“Then let the gods live a day in my skin before they judge me.”
The third point of view character is Darius, and I liked Darius a lot too. His backstory though is never explored to its fullest (in this book, but I hope it is in the other two), e.g., his relation to the Vices and why he is running from Malice and why Malice never stops chasing him. He quickly became my favorite character, as well as Katashi, and I enjoyed reading his chapters more than those of Endymion and Hana. The funny thing is both Endymion and Darius have the same character arc, that of self-acceptance, but where Endymion doesn’t know who he is and how to control his Empathy, Darius does and hates himself because of it. All he wants is to be someone else. Endymion’s journey of self-acceptance, on the other hand, is deeply entangled with finding out who he is. He doesn’t understand his powers and wishes someone will help him learn how to control them. It is all he wants. However, there are times when I thought that Endymion let his Empathy cripple him too much.
Of all three point-of-view characters I liked Hana the least. She is a woman living in a man’s world, and from the beginning she has to fight for what she wants. I understand that. Fighting against that tide is hard. But Hana is just not a likeable character. She complains about her position in life too much; so much so that it readily becomes the only outstanding feature about her in the entire book and it gets annoying pretty fast. The only valuable political card she has is marriage and she hates it. But I also think she’s too naïve and gullible to outsmart anyone from manipulating her. In short, she’s not mature enough and still has some growing up to do, and it shows.
The last character I want to talk about here is Emperor Kin. We meet him in Darius’s chapters, and I admit that, compared to Katashi, Emperor Kin’s character is flat and two-dimensional in this book. I was expecting more, and all I got was a cardboard character that felt like he was just there because the author needed someone to set Katashi up against. I would have liked to see more depth to his character. He did, after all, plot against Emperor Lan and organize a coup…at least someone more deceitful and conniving.
The book itself, however, is not a bad book. I liked its quick pacing and how the author keeps you at the edge of your seat wanting to find out what happens to each character… because almost every chapter ends in a cliffhanger, and you cannot stop reading. Hence, it makes for a very quick read. The story is very much a character-driven story, and each character’s story arc and development advance the plot. There is no part within the book where nothing happens, and I liked that. In other words, it is a book full of action, so if that is what you’re looking for, that is what you get here.
I gave this book a I Liked It And Will Probably Read It Again rating.
