I think if you enjoy seafaring fantasy and interesting worldbuilding, and care less about the writing style, The Bone Ships might work for you. But for a reader who pays attention to the writing, this felt sloppy. 

I really thought I would be able to get into it after the first few pages, but the clunky sentences, grammatical errors, and the way Barker would tell us what was happening rather depicting something and allowing us to draw conclusions, wore on me pretty fast. 

Most egregious, in the 80 pages that I read, were these two examples:

It reads like it's straight out of a picture book, or a poem for children (there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, anyone?), and would have taken an editor mere moments to rework. There were many sentences like this that just needed extra attention, and if the book had recieved that attention the text would have flowed better. The prose wasn't unbearably bad overall, but that almost made it worse because I could see the potential.

Oof, but also it comes after MANY repetitions of the fact that the crew is pathetically untrained and lazy. It's fine that Barker explicitly told us this more than once, especially given we're situated in Joron's perspective. But it felt exhausting to read this reminder once again, and I couln't help but imagine how tense the scene would have been if Barker had instead taken the time to SHOW us how an untrained and lazy crew would have reacted to Meas' battle commands. It could have been stressful and frantic, but was just another opportunity for Barker to make sure we understood how much Joron had failed as Shipwife, and I think that disappointment finally gave me the push I needed to set this book aside. 

This was such a solid fantasy novel! I enjoyed this all throughout my reading, but didn’t realize just how much I was loving it until I finished this book and had to wait a few days for the next one from the library. Also, turns out that seafaring fantasy novels are my JAM (the only other fantasy books I’ve read that spend significant time on ships were installments in larger series, so I hadn’t picked up on that thread of commonality until this book).

This starts out in classic fantasy style, i.e. lots of confusion for the first 100 pages or so. But while I didn’t always know what Barker was talking about, I was enjoying the prose enough that it wasn’t a hardship to keep reading. He definitely has a distinctive voice that I really enjoy, and I definitely plan on reading other series from him in the future. Once we actually get to solid plot points it really picks up, and was even more fun to read. The worldbuilding is very interesting, unique yet written believably. Also, all of the chapters had names, which I found so fun! Books don’t seem to do this as much anymore, which is a bit of a shame. The chapters were also fairly short (at least for fantasy books), which made this book more digestible. 

From early on there are some darker aspects to this novel, which I always enjoy because it makes the stakes higher throughout – if you know that the author isn’t afraid of death and loss, you as the reader are never sure of how things will turn out. This was especially evident in the climax, which had me rather nervous!

I absolutely love how he handled this part. Things were not going well for our crew, which was super realistic, but then the dragon saved them!!! And in turn they saved the dragon!!!

It took a while for me to connect to the characters, especially our main character, Joron. Not because anything was lacking, but it was almost like a slow burn of a relationship between the reader and the characters. I actually really like how this turned out, and I think the slower start really paid off. We get a diverse cast of characters (black main character! older woman other main character!), and all have a purpose to the narrative. But more than that, they were all interesting and flawed and well-rounded. (Very interested to see what happens with Dinyl’s character in the rest of the series!) 

One element that I think was done SO beautifully was this subtle element of grief that runs throughout the novel. Our main character’s father has recently died before the events of this book, and we experience his constant thoughts and feelings about his father; he’ll remember things his father told him, or things will happen that remind him of his father (or specifically how his father died), and we as the reader can tap into this grief, and see how it influences Joron as a character, without it having to be explicitly spelled out.

I did happen to catch a few typos throughout this, nothing major, but in the acknowledgements it sounds like this book was written on a fairly tight schedule. (Barker also mentions that not all of the technical ship stuff might not be accurate because he didn’t have as much time to research as he liked, but it didn’t bother a landlubber like me).

I just could not get into this book