Review: The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker

The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker
My rating: 2.8 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 24, 2019


As a longtime fantasy reader, few things annoy me as much as writers who needlessly invent words. I don't mean words for new concepts, new animals, new magical elements, things like that; I mean word substitutions that serve no logical purpose. Saying "sither" instead of sister. (Still using "brother", though!) Saying "Skearith's Eye" instead of "the sun". An endless slew of Those Dreaded Compound Words---we all know and fear them!---when the author slaps two or more unrelated words together to describe an object that probably doesn't need a name to begin with, attempting to dazzle us with their worldbuilding skills while only succeeding in ripping us out of the story.

The Bone Ships sins greatly in this regard, and it sins right from the start. The sheer quantity of unnecessary invented words operates like the story version of a speed bump; just as you start getting into the story, whoops! Here's another string of nonsense words whose only purpose is to force you to stop and figure out what the hell is being described. By the time you return to the story proper, all sense of pacing and plot and character development has metaphorically tumbled off the cliff. (The fact that most of this story takes place on a ship, which already has lots of unfamiliar elements, does not help matters.)

The story is uncomplicated. Ship captain ('shipwife', all ships here being dubbed as male) Joron Twiner loses a fight (and command of his ship of condemned criminals) to the famous Meas Gilbryn, and ends up serving as her second-in-command on a quest to save the last known arakeesian (a sort of sea dragon, a long-thought-extinct race whose bones are used to make ships), hopefully bringing peace between two warring seafaring nations in the process. Many and sundry things happen along the way, few of which held my attention for any length, leading to a somewhat anticlimactic ending and a setup for Book 2.

Part of me wonders if I'd have enjoyed this more had the story been centered on the island archipelago, not on a ship. Because the politics of this society are, if not always the most logical, certainly more enthralling than the action on the open seas: in this world, much of the population is born deformed in some way, and political power is held by women who prove their 'strength' by giving birth to unblemished children and surviving the births, (and by the men who service them sexually). Each firstborn child is sacrificed to the ships, creating magical 'corpselights' that the population believes are necessary to power the ships, even though ships exist that have no corpselights and everyone knows those work just fine. They also seem to assign jobs to the malformed based on what they've lost: lose a foot, you become a cobbler. Lose a hand, you have to sew. Like I said, this is not the most logical society in the fantasy genre, but I think you really can't go wrong with human sacrifice and a fertility-based political system, at least when it comes to the entertainment factors.

Overall, this was just not my cup of tea.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.