Fate Inked in Blood, by Danielle L. Jensen

RichardAbbott

Fate Inked in Blood, by Danielle L. Jensen, is another book passed on to me by our local bookseller.

Reading this was a complete contrast to The Horses - it's an action tale wanting to be read at fast pace, with frequent fight scenes and liberal dollops of quite explicit sex - until the end of the book this is constantly halted before consummation so there's a lot of delayed gratification! I had an irreverent thought at one stage wondering if "throbbing" was the most frequent word in the book.

The setting is a Viking society - or at least what passes as a Viking society in the popular imagination, and I did wonder from time to time what my historical fiction friends who know about the era might think. However, that sort of doesn't matter as it's not historical fiction, but rather is set in a fantasy world. In this world, the Norse gods are tangibly real, in particular with the habit of investing fragments of their power in mortals who can then, in the right situation, call upon this power to work magical acts. At first the implication is that such individuals are rare, but this seems to be a narrative convenience rather than a real constraint. Towards the end of the book the protagonist finds herself trapped on a boat with an entire shipload of them, thus rendering her own powers useless. It's a bit like a super-hero story where you never quite know just how many super-heroes there are, and where they're all blond haired blue eyed Nordic types...

There's not a lot of character development - the protagonist keeps having thoughts that maybe she's not a nice person, but this doesn't seem to substantially change her. There's an odd contrast going on - on the one hand it feels as though she's doomed to keep on treading the same tired circle, but at the same time there is an often-repeated theme that she is a person whose fate is her own to write rather than being preordained by The Norns.

Like The Horses, Fate Inked in Blood promises that the story will continue in Part 2, but in this case the break is quite abrupt with a clear sense of being unfinished. I don't think I'd be in a hurry to get the next part, as I suspect it would just be more of the same.

Who would like this book? Well, there's certainly times and places where it would fit in - a long journey or holiday book, maybe, when you're not looking for depth or the provocation of thought but rather a racy piece of action escapism. My own preference for that is old-style space opera, but I can imagine this book filling the same gap for other readers.