Blood Metal Bone by Lindsay Cummings

Review

Thank you to HQ for including me on the blog tour and sending me a copy of Blood Metal Bone via Netgalley! I actually went into my local Waterstones when the latest UK Lockdown was announced and saw it in paperback so I grabbed it!

I’m so glad I did, Blood Metal Bone is a treat for fantasy, sci-fi and western lovers alike. Cummings utilises all her skills in delivering a fabulous novel filled with sass, adventure, magic, space, dragons and smuggling. The magic itself is beautifully portrayed – I loved how the book explored clashes between science and nature through life and death. It really is a book that is staying with me and I’ve struggled to write down my thoughts as I keep finding more bits I want to include.

This was my first book by Lindsay Cummings and definitely won’t be my last. Her writing style is smooth with a talent for making topics easy to understand and inclusive. She develops her characters steadily and builds her worlds up efficiently so the reader isn’t left feeling lost. Blood Metal Bone packs a big punch, in the acknowledgements, Cummings says she has been working on it for years and you can tell – everything is researched and developed.

My only drawback is that everything was crammed into one book. It didn’t feel rushed, but I felt like there was room to grow the characters more and develop their relationships in the story. This would have worked well as a duology I think, Cummings refers to past relationships between characters and skims over events so that she can cover a ten year period when I think the reader could benefit from a little more involvement in what happened. I’d definitely be up for reading some short stories to fill in those gaps!

That being said, you do gain an understanding of the characters motives throughout and a few curveballs are thrown which I enjoyed. Sonara is a complex protagonist, with sassy comebacks and a difficult past, Cummings has poured a lot of herself into her – especially her love of horses which shines through right from the start. Karr, one of the Wanderers from space has a lot of hidden depth and I probably connected with him the most. I liked the different perspectives that were included throughout the narrative – I think this style was integral to getting a well rounded story built up.

As I said, I enjoyed the magic system and its links to the planet itself, the western style mixed in with a brilliant planet system worked seamlessly. What completely blew me away was being on a planet one second, getting comfortably into my fantasy grove and then being whisked onto a spaceship – absolutely threw me off but I appreciated how Cummings integrated the differences and made it work! I’ve not really read anything quite like it before!

I’m recommending Blood Metal Bone to anyone who enjoys fantasy and sci-fi or just plain adventure tales! I’ve been slowly upping my rating for this one because I keep finding things I loved about it! Please grab yourselves a copy and let me know how you get on!

Goodreads Rating 4 / 5