An interesting premise that caught my attention, but there were too many issues to keep my interest. Too much of the story defied logic. Not in a fantastical way, but in a “that doesn’t make any actual sense” sort of way. Right from the beginning. The book starts with Anna running away from home with her little brother because he was sold for an unknown purpose. Her brother is handicap and always rides a pony when they leave the house. Her escape was planned in advance, but she left the horse behind. Then while on the run one of the trackers catches up to them. Anna makes a bargain, but she comes up with the idea to leave her brother and she will run off with the tracker. What? She loves him, he’s handicapped and can’t continue on, they ran away so he could be free, but she wants to leave him to the men who will take him to be a slave. It made no sense. That beginning set the tone for other things that are simply nonsensical.

Another issue I had with this book is that we are dropped in this world with no explanation of the climate and feeling of the cultures. While she was still in her homeland we got no feel for it. She travels, but we don’t know how far it is between each stop. She goes to other lands with people that speak different languages and look different from her, but there isn’t any much context. Dropping the reader like this without clear world building only works when the lead character is also lost, so surroundings are learned in tandem. I highly doubt I’ll read the next book in this series because of how hard it was for me to get through this one.

The synopsis of Scribes caught my attention and I was looking forward to it. It was a disappointment: I couldn’t connect to the world or the characters for the entire book.

It starts well: siblings on the run from trackers. They get caught and the older sister tries to bargain her secret power as a scribe to save her brother. It backfires, the brother gets killed and she ends up taken prisoner by the tracker. I started to get a grip on the characters and what being a scribe meant.

After that?

No idea.

One of the main problems was that I didn’t like Anna. She starts off alright; a frightened girl in over her head, struggling to keep a secret. But her refusal to leave Shem forces the boy into a sort-of-slavery, and Anna doesn’t care about the consequences. She uses his awe of her to suit her own purposes, then treats him like a jealous lover, or a tool, for the rest of the book.

Anna enjoys her power. She likes being the chosen one, being considered as a goddess. She thinks it is her right. Of course, there are passages of her lamenting that she can’t control it etc, but apart from refusing to mark a few of the darker characters, she makes no attempt to use her power to help people, or think about the consequences of marking those attempting to wage war on others. She mourns her brother, but never thinks about the destruction she is causing in his name.

It’s always fun when the lines between the good guys and the bad guys are blurry, but in this case, I struggled to identify friend from foe. Anna’s own opinions do not help: she states she hates the tracker but does nothing to escape from him. She thinks negatively about Bora, yet seeks her counsel and advice. It read as if the character relationships progress, but Anna’s thinking doesn’t, leaving the reader muddling their way with no clear idea.

There are no strong characters: the tracker dissolves into the background, Bora is to abrupt to connect to her, Shem acts as a jealous child and even a supposedly-powerful leader is nothing but a shell by the end.

I also couldn’t figure out the world. There were a lot of fantasy-based names and places, but nothing to ground the reader. I couldn’t figure out the world the characters lived in, meaning I couldn’t connect or envision it.

This is a book about morals, responsibility and power. It is about considering the consequences of actions: what it means for Shem’s family that he is forced to leave, what it means to have violent men forever marked and made invulnerable, what it means to hold the fate of people in your hands. For me, however, Anna never considers those consequences; she acts as she wants and uses her status as a goddess to get away with it.

Unfortunately, for me, the book lacked clarity and a forward momentum.

Scribes by James Wolanyk is the first book of the new fantasy Scribe Cycle series. The series introduces Anna who had been hiding her ability of being a Scribe and being able to carve runes into others flesh to grant temporary invulnerability against enemies.

When Anna was forced to run she finds herself trapped by a tracker and as negotiations begin to decline Anna uses her ability to bargain. This puts Anna at the trackers mercy at which time Anna vows to use her ability to help fight to restore her homeland.

I have to first admit the idea of carving runes into someone immediately had me thinking of the Shadowhunter series by Cassandra Clare in which they tattoo protection upon each other. This story however is pretty far away from that book in the type of fantasy that is contained within. The opening chapter quickly showed the reader just how dark and disturbing Anna’s world could be.

Now while I did find this book to be an entertaining fantasy for the most part there were a couple of things that I noticed while reading that lowered my rating a bit. First, the style of the writing in the book is one that can be a bit on the overly descriptive/wordy side for my taste which does make parts drag to me. But I also thought to myself a few times that the story seemed a little jumpy getting from one scene to the next. Overall though it was a pretty intense darker fantasy for the adult readers.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

DNF. Anna has scribe magic that grants the receiver of her carved in flesh rune, good health, impervious to wounds, etc. While this was a good premise, there was a lot of plot missing that I couldn't finish it at 50%. I gave up because of the following; What happened to the dog that he had as a tracker? Anna is seriously hurt, and no explanation of how the tracker got her to the Inn, got ahold of help, nothing. Why couldn't she "rune" Shem? Who told the horse riders attacking the train, who were they? Too many made up words that kept pulling me out of the story. These were too many things at half way, that I just couldn't read any more. It was like parts were edited out of a fairly decent book. I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book from Netgalley.

This was not a bad book, it was simply not a ME book. It wasn't borING, but I was borED. I liked the world that was created here and how well things were described. I just didn't get into it all that much. It did bug me that that there were so many made up words for the languages here that were not always explained. Or things in general that were not explained. I also did not like the main character, Anna. I'm not sure of her exact age, but I know she is young. Maybe just barely a teenager or almost a teenager. And it shows. She was so immature and naive that it drove me absolutely insane sometimes. I didn't agree with most of her decisions and I really disliked how she was so selfish so often.

Scribes are people in this world that have the power to grant people strength, heal them or such by carving runes onto their body. Anna is one of these scribes, though she has lived her life so far hiding this. Unlike all the others though, Anna's marks do not fade over time. When forced into a corner, this is made apparent and Anna's life will never be the same. She agrees to help a group toward their goal and she gets thrown into place she never even dreamed of and has absolutely no idea how to navigate. And more often than not, her decisions can and do lead to the deaths or suffering of others. No matter what she does.

There is a lot of fighting, a lot of politics, some good people, some bad people, and whole lot of "who do you trust?" going on here. It was an interesting story, but like I said, just not one I particularly got into so I won't be continuing it.