Review
The Bone Shard Daughter is an excellent book. It’s not one I’d heard of before I read it which is a shame because it is truly excellent. This book needs more love because Stewart really captures the imagination in this one. This is an intricate story of family, survival and empires. In this book you have constructs, creatures created by the Emperor to watch over his subjects – and they obey his commands. Lin is the Emperor’s daughter and she wants to do well and earn his approval so she can rule one day, but she must compete with her adopted brother who often does better than her. This aggravates her to no end, and she often tries to get into the locked rooms with stolen or replicated keys.
Lin is an ingenious character, and she has such an instinct for survival, and is creative. I love her as a character because she is interesting and nuanced. The book is partially from her POV, but she does share it with some other characters as well. Lin had my favorite story of them all, I was constantly waiting to get back to her (or Jovis’ point of view). To me they had the most interest surrounding them.
Jovis is an interesting character both in the book and from my perspective. He gets in and out of trouble, and he’s on a quest to find someone, but ends up helping the revolution, albeit reluctantly. And part of the revolution are Sand, Ranami and Phalue, who are our two other POV characters. One is poor and the other is rich.
Through these four POVs we get to see all sides of a situation and all the variety that this empire has to offer. It makes for interesting reading. We also have diversity in the book with Phalue and Ranami being in a relationship, an apparently volatile one. They must each learn about each other and what is the right thing to do.
Stewart’s book is fast paced and kept me turning the pages of this book. It was well written and I firmly enjoyed it. And the ending of it was amazing, and tied so many of the individual stories together! I love when a book brings all the characters together in a way that makes sense.
This was a solid book – and I highly encourage people to pick it up. I will be eagerly waiting for the next book in this series to read!