Niharika 's Reviews > Five Broken Blades

The Formal Review

If you ever thought your decision making skills were kinda wonky, well, I stayed up all night the day before I was going on a long-journey vacation finishing up a book that I'm giving two stars.

Five Broken Blades tries to be a lot of things: high fantasy, twisty heist drama, found family of morally grey characters... but what it ends up being is a malformed romance, coupled with juvenile writing and a lacklustre narrative style.

I don't know if I'm extra salty because I'm sensing that my fantasy era is fizzling to a pathetic end or because of my chronic sleep deprivation. Is this what watching bad action films feels like? Because I really don't understand how this book made me waste the most precious six hours of my day.

This book follows six main characters: a hitman called Royo, another hit-woman called... fuck I don't care to look up, something with a S, her protector-slash-owner Tyung, a thief called Aeri, an exiled prince and a spy. All of them are recruited to assassinate the reigning emperor, who is, unfortunately, immortal. None of them trust each other. What happens next is the supposed plot of the book.

I say "supposed", because I'm actually not sure if it was, in fact, the focus of the book. From what I saw, they were all busy falling oh-so-madly in love. And even the romance wasn't written right. My feelings towards various booktok tropes are lukewarm at best. I don't care if you want to advertise the central aspect of your book through a string of preformed words like one-bed-only or second-chance-romance; just make sure that that's not all we're getting, okay? Unfortunately, the love stories in this book didn't get past their one-word summations. We spent the entire book building up the tropes, and then, out of the blue, they were all kissing and stuff.

One of my biggest quibbles about these books is their perceived sexism. If I were making up a fantastical world from scratch, why would I make all the men chauvinist pigs? I'm so fed up with this. We don't need sexism in fantasy novels to make the female characters seem extra-special. Ordinary women can be as much of a wonder woman if given the chance. At the same time, just because these men aren't your girl-scout cinnamon rolls, they don't need to be wannabe Andrew Tates either.

The writing was rather inadequate for something of this magnitude. Action scenes were drawn out to a stretch, characters weren't three-dimensional, and a lot of significant things were happening off-page. Add to that countless unnecessary povs (I like you, Ty, but you don't matter shit), shallow side characters who also does nothing for the story, and overly simplistic, adjective-deficient prose, you get Five Broken Blades. But as I'm repeating non-stop, it did glue me to itself, so there has to be something addictive there. Or I'm even more of a dumb dumb than I thought.

Also, how anticlimactic was that ending? You could totally read someone's spoilery review and jump into the second book; you wouldn't be missing that much.

TL;DR:- I want a refund for my wasted sleeping hours.

Thoughts While Reading

* I'll never get over high fantasy swearing. What do you mean you say "Gods on high" every time you trip on a pebble? lol.
* Whoa, "Lord Yama, the king of hells" is mentioned. Indian mythology is that you?
* In the matter of life and death, be horny.
* Nothing is sexier than second-chance romance if it's done right. But is it done right?
*One of the characters is giving Fanfiction Draco Malfoy, and I'm not sure I'm thrilled about that.
* I don't know what goes on inside the heads of fantasy writers, but I would've picked prettier names for the minor characters.
*Wait, I can't find my jaw, did it just land on the floor?
* Why is it "five" broken blades when there are six main characters? Am I missing something?
* Just pulled an all-nighter for this. It wasn't even worth it. What am I going to do with myself?
* How can you write a book with grumpy x sunshine, enemies to lovers, and second chance romance tropes, and turn all of them into insta love? smh.