It’s finally here! I promised this blog tour post would be up last weekend so apologies it’s a bit late! I only finished this book after the tour finished! 😬 I was sent an eARC of The Carnival of Ash by Rebellion in exchange for an honest review.
The Blurb:
Cadenza is the City of Words, a city run by poets, its skyline dominated by the steepled towers of its libraries, its heart beating to the stamp and thrum of the printing presses in the Printing Quarter.
Carlo Mazzoni, a young wordsmith arrives at the city gates intent on making his name as the bells ring out with the news of the death of the city’s poet-leader. Instead, he finds himself embroiled with the intrigues of a city in turmoil, the looming prospect of war with their rival Venice ever-present. A war that threatens not only to destroy Cadenza but remove it from history altogether…
Honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to finish this book initially. I was reading it for 20 days in total in the end, and it’s under 600 pages. I wasn’t enjoying this at the beginning, however in the end I gave it 3 stars.
The book felt, at times, quite disjointed, and felt more like a collection of short stories until right at the end. There were only a few ‘Cantos’ that I enjoyed and stuck out to me in the end. I liked some of the characters we met, such as Hypatia and Lucrezia. There were some characters and cantos that I didn’t enjoy as much, and I did find there were a lot of characters to keep track of.
When I signed up for this blog tour, I was under the impression that this was a fantasy book, however there wasn’t actually that much fantasy in this book. I only recall one moment which had an element of fantasy, but I was expecting a lot more.
The last canto made me increase my rating as everything seemed to come together finally! It was interesting to read this last section, and to see more of characters we’d met in previous sections. Overall this book was good, but I did find it a little confusing at times with all of the different characters across the 12 cantos. Some of the characters were really interesting, but some weren’t very likable, and were written in a way that didn’t keep my attention.
Thank you Dave for including me in this tour, sorry my review is a little late!
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