Tag: Charlotte Bond

Review – The Bloodless Princes

Posted March 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Bloodless Princes

The Bloodless Princes

by Charlotte Bond

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 151
Series: The Fireborne Blade #2
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

A tale of death, honor and true love's embrace. Come for the journey through the underworld. Stay for the minacious dragon-cat.

It seemed the afterlife was bustling.

Cursed by the previous High Mage, and following an...incident...with a supremely powerful dragon, newly-promoted High Mage Saralene visits the afterlife with a boon to beg of the Bloodless Princes who run the underworld.

But Saralene and her most trusted advisor/champion/companion, Sir Maddileh, will soon discover that there’s only so much research to be done by studying the old tales, though perhaps there’s enough truth in them to make a start.

Saralene will need more than just her wits to leave the underworld, alive. And Maddileh will need more than just her Fireborne Blade.

A story of love and respect that endures beyond death. And of dragons, because we all love a dragon!

Charlotte Bond’s The Bloodless Princes is a pretty immediate follow-up to The Fireborne Blade, so definitely start by reading that. It took me a little bit to get myself back into the world and characters, especially as I experienced the end of the first book as being rather dark and ambiguous, and all signs point here to Bond not… having intended that, and thinking of Maddileh and Saralene as unambiguously “good guys”, totally justified in what they did, without any hint of darkness about it. But… sorry, no matter how awful someone has been, using weird dragon/blood magic to take over their body and thus kill them isn’t morally neutral.

Once I got past that dissonance, it was still a fun enough read, but I wasn’t expecting as much from it, since it kind of retroactively edited The Fireborne Blade to be more straightforwardly heroic than I’d originally thought it. Maddileh and Saralene become a romance plot with more than a hint of Orpheus and Eurydice, and it’s kind of predictable. There’s some fun lore, and it’s nice to understand more about the dragons and how they view their relationship with humans.

It ticks along at a good pace, and I enjoyed it for what it was, but depending on how you felt about The Fireborne Blade other than “ooh, female knight! girl power!”, it might be rather disappointing.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Fireborne Blade

Posted February 4, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – The Fireborne Blade

The Fireborne Blade

by Charlotte Bond

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 192
Series: The Fireborne Blade #1
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Kill the dragon. Find the blade. Reclaim your honor. It’s that, or end up like countless knights before her, as a puddle of gore and molten armor.

Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff.

A minor infraction forces her to redeem her honor in the most dramatic way possible, she must retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, legendary dragon the White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it's that “die trying” is where to wager your coin.

Maddileh’s tale contains a rich history of dragons, ill-fated knights, scheming squires, and sapphic love, with deceptions and double-crosses that will keep you guessing right up to its dramatic conclusion. Ultimately, The Fireborne Blade is about the roles we refuse to accept, and of the place we make for ourselves in the world.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Charlotte Bond’s The Fireborne Blade was obviously meant for me the second I saw that cover — or perhaps even more meant for my sister, let’s be honest. It has an interesting structure of jumping back and forth in time, and it becomes obvious why at the end (it’s not just the author not knowing where to start the story!).

It seems like a straightforward quest story, with an object at the end, and what we get is something a bit more tricksy. I was also expecting to feel much less ambivalent about how the book ends, but the book dodges being too obvious and straightforward about that, and gives us something unsettling and morally ambiguous. At least, I found it so — vengeance probably shouldn’t seem the clean and simple thing it is in some novels, so this isn’t a criticism at all!

I have so many questions about the world, and loved the little glimpses of other knights, other dragons, and all the customs around them. It’s a story that’s pretty complete in itself, but left me curious about what more would look like.

Rating: 4/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted January 3, 2024 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Somehow it’s Wednesday again already, so here are my threes Ws for this week:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What have you recently finished reading?
  • What are you reading next?

Linking up with Taking on a World of Words. I hope there’ll be a bit more commenting this week; last week was pretty quiet, perhaps because of the Christmas/New Year period.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve been a bit fidgety and not settling down very well, so I’ve ended up starting two new books, which are both quite short. Yesterday during my breaks at work I started reading The Fireborne Blade (Charlotte Bond), which has a neat cover and is so far intriguing enough. I’m wondering if my sister might like it, since it stars a female knight… but we’ll have to see how things go.

I’m also reading Ice Cream: A Global History (Laura B. Weiss), from the Edible series. Predictably, it made me really want ice cream; maybe something from Ruby Violet… their malted milk ice cream was amazing.

What have you recently finished reading?

My first finished read of 2024 was Kai Kupferschmidt’s Blue, which was a pretty quick read and beautifully illustrated. It had a few facts I didn’t know, and explained things very clearly, where it dug into stuff like chemical structures or how vision works.

I actually read most of it in 2023, but saved the epilogue for 2024, so it’d count for this year and not spoil the lovely round number I had for books finished in 2023, heh.

What will you be reading next?

Cover of The Book of Perilous Dishes by Doina RustiLast week I talked about finishing Rose Lerner’s Sailor’s Delight, and I’d still like to do that. I also want to read Tobi Ogundiran’s In the Shadow of the Fall, which is a book I received to review, because I’d like to try and be on top of those in 2024. (Pigs might fly, too, but let’s try to keep our optimism!)

Other than those, I’m eyeing up The Book of Perilous Dishes (Doina Ruști), because I’m very curious about it.

How about you? What’re you reading?

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