Blood on the Bark

I received a free ARC copy of this book through Penpinery in exchange for an honest review.

Full disclosure, I only got through the first 100 pages of this book. I fully planned to finish it, whether I enjoyed it or not, since this was a review copy, but the book surprised me ⅓ of the way through with a very NSFW moment (not technically a sex scene, but *way* more suggestive and graphic than I'm personally comfortable with) and I was unwilling to keep reading after that. More on that at the end of the review.

Writing

The writing style of this book was very difficult to follow. I was constantly disoriented and felt like I was stopping myself to ask “wait, what's actually happening?” every page or two.

On a sentence level, there were also frequent issues with clarity (e.g. it not being clear who a pronoun was referring to) and clunky or awkward phrasing.

Plot

There were some interesting ideas here, but the actual execution just felt very rushed (though not fast paced), and somewhat choppy and inorganic.

Characters would also do stupid things to progress the plot, and most problems were solved via plot conveniences just to move the story forward.

Characters

The characters in this book were not very distinct. 100 pages in, I still feel unsure what their personalities were supposed to be.

The story was also very vague about the characters' backstories, far past the point that I felt certain things should have been explained. A lot of scenes felt weak because they were clearly relying on character background and history that was never really made adequately clear for the reader. Sometimes it told you enough that you could guess, but only being 60%-80% that I could even understand the dynamics of what's going on in a scene was kind of a brain ache and not very fun or satisfying.

The characters's emotional journeys were somewhat choppy in the same way the plot was, and overall, the emotions in this book were not written very well. The story didn't know how to slow down and dig into the most intense or emotional moments to really make them hit hard, and there was a pattern of dropping the emotional thread of the story entirely sometimes only to seemingly “remember” it and describe a character suddenly feeling something.

Worldbuilding

The worldbuilding was my favorite part of this book, and included quite a few things I really loved, (I love a civilization that exists on a giant tree!) but it suffered from the same vagueness and “not enough information to really know what's going on” problems as the rest of the book.

It's great for a story to avoid over-explanation and info dumping, but this book seemed to avoid directly describing or giving details about anything even when they should be front and center, which made it hard to pick up much from context. A lot of what I knew about the story world by the time I put it down felt, again, more like strong guesses than solid knowledge, which wasn't very comfortable or immersive as a reader.

Content Warnings and Spice Level

-One scene where the FMC undresses to care for a wound and the male character is noticing her genital area.
-Other, non-sexual nudity in a trafficking/dehumanization context
-Some mild fatphobia with the way minor characters are described. (Not egregious by any means, but something to be aware of if you're sensitive to that.

This story was rated as one pepper/spice level 1 on Penpinery, (essentially their equivalent to “glimpses and kisses” on the romance.io scale) which I feel was NOT accurate, and a misrepresentation by the author. I feel like that may have been a misunderstanding of Penpinery’s system on the author’s part, since their book description says “closed door”—which would usually imply something closer to a 2—but the graphic (though brief) on-page voyeurism felt like way too much for even a two-pepper book to me. That's the kind of stuff I expect will stay behind “closed doors,” so I really wish the marketing had been clearer.