enne📚 reviewed Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
Voyage of the Damned
3 stars
The setup of this story is that the twelve provinces of Concordia have sent their heirs on a voyage by themselves to the Goddess's Mountain, and while en route one of the heirs is mysteriously murdered.
The mystery in this story worked well for me. Each heir has a Blessing, which takes the form of some sort of magical power (fire breathing, invisibility) but it's considered gauche to ask people what form it takes. The reveal and ongoing discovery of what Blessing each heir has becomes part of the mystery. (And on top of that the narrator Ganymedes does not actually have a Blessing and has to disguise this fact from his fellow heirs.) There's some twists and complications, enough crumbs for the reader to guess at what might be happening, and it all gets a good reveal in the end.
The worldbuilding was a bit weak. It's a bit …
The setup of this story is that the twelve provinces of Concordia have sent their heirs on a voyage by themselves to the Goddess's Mountain, and while en route one of the heirs is mysteriously murdered.
The mystery in this story worked well for me. Each heir has a Blessing, which takes the form of some sort of magical power (fire breathing, invisibility) but it's considered gauche to ask people what form it takes. The reveal and ongoing discovery of what Blessing each heir has becomes part of the mystery. (And on top of that the narrator Ganymedes does not actually have a Blessing and has to disguise this fact from his fellow heirs.) There's some twists and complications, enough crumbs for the reader to guess at what might be happening, and it all gets a good reveal in the end.
The worldbuilding was a bit weak. It's a bit hard to be tossed into a fantasy world with a bunch of different countries, but the countries here all feel a bit shallow--they are all represented by an animal and they each have one feature and one magical hair color that they're known for. This also means that the reader has to be told about the background to all of these different countries (and that they probably couldn't be much more complicated, with twelve of them).
I had fun with this book and I enjoyed the mystery, but my biggest gripe is that the goofy internal narration just didn't land for me. It's not that I need my fantasy to be all serious all the time, but the silly narrator was not my kind of humor.
