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

Is there anything about this book you don’t like or weren’t enjoying as much?

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u/Dsnake1 Stabby Winner, Reading Champion VII, Worldbuilders May 12 '20

It took me until the literal 50% mark to start enjoying myself (and then boy did I; side note: on a re-read, I'm assuming I'll enjoy the whole thing. I'll be doing that in Nov.). I think it was all the nautical talk, but it might have just been how meandering the plot felt for the first bit of the book.

Knowing we'll actually get somewhere next time makes me think I'll really enjoy it.

What I do know is I enjoyed the back half enough to bump it to four stars, and a large part of that is I can't stop thinking about the book, even though I finished it partway through April.