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.