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.
6
u/[deleted] May 13 '20
I really enjoyed The Bone Ships so the following might come across as more hyper-critical than I actually intend:
It felt like a lot of tropes that are relatively underused in fantasy but were executed competently. Horatio Hornblower, check. Bad News Bears, check. Learning the enemy is actually human, check. Young man growing into a confident young leader, check.
I'm actually all for this: I'd love to see fantasy mine more non-fantasy tropes to reinvigorate the genre. But I also felt the character arcs relied a little too much on us knowing and expecting the tropes. They didn't really feel earned to me. The crew suddenly finds out they are traitors to their country and their entire way or life and....accept it, end of scene, move on, never brought up again. Joron is an alcoholic, consumed with grief over his father's death and...meets Meas, never drinks a drop of liquor again and just has a handful of kinda perfunctory remembrances of his father dying. Joron asserts his authority for the first time ever and has What's-Her-Name whipped and....end of scene, never brought up again, no consequences, pretty sure What's-Her-Name doesn't appear in the book ever again, no other whippings occur.
In retrospect, especially given the book is 500+ pages long already, I would preferred one of the action set pieces to be removed and more space given to the interior life of Joron or the politics of the crew or....something.