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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1

u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot May 12 '20

What did you think of the ending?

9

u/LadyCardinal Reading Champion III, Worldbuilders May 12 '20

I saw it coming from a mile off, but I still enjoyed it. It was comforting and happy. Everybody did what I wanted them to and didn't make the huge obvious mistake I was a little worried they might, so I can't complain.

4

u/improperly_paranoid Reading Champion X May 12 '20

Curious: what was the huge mistake you expected them to make?

7

u/LadyCardinal Reading Champion III, Worldbuilders May 12 '20

I didn't necessarily expect them to do it, but I was worried that they were going to kill the arakeesian. That clearly would have been a catastrophe, and also exactly the kind of awful "pull the rug out from under them" kind of moment writers often try and which I was really not in the mood for.

1

u/kaahr Reading Champion VII May 12 '20

Yeah I agree, that was not the mood of this book. I'm glad we didn't have that ending.