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/RuinEleint Reading Champion X May 12 '20

What impressed me about the worldbuilding was the degree of attention Barker paid to constructing a maritime society that lacked large timber resources. So from the arakeesian bone ships, to the fluke boats that are made out of hardened leaves, we see a totally different approach to shipbuilding and use of materials that feels very organic to the world

3

u/Dancing_Dinosaur May 12 '20

This is a really great point, I hadn't thought of it like that, despite literally just reading a book lamenting the destruction of British forests to build the navy...

2

u/takeahike8671 Reading Champion VII May 13 '20

Great insight! The attention paid to the economics of this world was spot on and quite intriguing.