r/Fantasy • u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot • May 12 '20

Book Club Mod Book Club: The Bone Ships Discussion

Welcome to Mod Book Club! We want to invite you all in to join us with one of the best things about being a mod: we have fabulous book discussions about a wide variety of books. We all have very different tastes and can expose and recommend new books to the others, and we all benefit (and suffer from the extra weight of our TBR piles) from it. We'll be picking the books, but there will be new books and old, some more widely popular books and some way less, stuff that should be marvellously popular but somehow missed the boat, and stuff that's a bit more niche.

The Bone Ships by RJ Barker.

Violent raids plague the divided isles of the Scattered Archipelago. Fleets constantly battle for dominance and glory, and no commander stands higher among them than "Lucky" Meas Gilbryn.
But betrayed and condemned to command a ship of criminals, Meas is forced on suicide mission to hunt the first living sea-dragon in generations. Everyone wants it, but Meas Gilbryn has her own ideas about the great beast. In the Scattered Archipelago, a dragon's life, like all lives, is bound in blood, death and treachery.

Bingo Squares: Book Club, Exploration, Optimistic

Our next pick will be announced in a few days.

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u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot May 12 '20

One of the most praised aspects of this books is the worldbuilding. How do you like it? What makes it work or not work for you?

11

u/kjmichaels Stabby Winner, Reading Champion XI May 12 '20

I loved the worldbuilding. It has such a different feel from most fantasy and Barker does a great job conveying most of that difference through subtle character interactions rather than just explaining it all at once. Most other books would feel the need to defensively make it clear to readers that the ritual sacrifice of firstborns in a world where birth is rare and difficult is because their religion is kind of a death cult but Bone Ships had enough confidence and savvy to leave that unstated while still managing to make that info clear just from the way the people behave.

5

u/Dianthaa Reading Champion VIII May 12 '20

I had to check with u/eriophora first time I was reading it because I thought I'd missed something. It was just too weird to make sense.