The Blood Stones
Legends of the Bruhai, Book 1
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The Blood Stones
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Narrated by:
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Andrew D. Meredith
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By:
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Tori Tecken
About this listen
His name is not worthy.
A traitor is executed, his name ripped away from history. Now the kingdom stands on the brink of a succession war that could bring the country to its knees. Forces stalk the darkness, moving pawns into place in a deadly game.
Gehrin and his brothers were not meant to witness the execution, but now they find themselves trapped in the center of a political quagmire. When Gehrin faces the loss of everything he knows, will he also lose himself?
To the south, tribal warlords clash in an endless cycle of violence. Syndri, the daughter of a chieftain, kills for the honor of her people. An alliance with a foreign queen offers the power to unite the tribes, but at what cost?
Someday, history will remember them as legends.
©2023 Tori Tecken (P)2024 Tori TeckenWhat listeners say about The Blood Stones
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Derek B.
- 03-17-25
Who you were before does not matter...
This slow burn start to a new epic fantasy series was an intriguing introduction to the characters and world even if none of it engaged me to the extent I hoped it would.
CHARACTERS
As with most epic fantasies, there are an assortment of characters who we follow in each chapter. Even though there are a handful in total, Gehrin and Syndri are who I would argue are the main characters, mostly just due to their having the lion's share of the page time. Of the two, I definitely liked Gehrin a lot more. He's taken from his family as a young boy and slowly molded over time into sort of like a brainwashed elite guard. It's hard not to sympathize with him due to all the horrible tribulations he faces, but he's also a kind soul at heart and that helped me feel more invested in his perspective. Syndri on the other hand is a fascinating character, but not one that I necessarily ever found myself specifically rooting for. She comes from a very violent part of the world and in one of her first scenes she savagely kills people from her enemy tribe. Because she and her tribe are so brutal themselves, I just had a hard time really feeling at all bad for them when violent things happened to them in return. Maybe that says more about me than it does the book that I need a reason to empathize with a character, but I just kind of felt unbothered by anything that happened to her or her family. Again though, her chapters are still very interesting, I just didn't have an emotional investment in those events. For both Gehrin and Syndri though, I felt like these characters were lacking any sort of real agency in their stories. They mostly just react to their situation and we never really get a sense of what their goals are outside of their desire to react in a certain way to their circumstances. This left me feeling like their personal journeys were kind of aimless and that lack of a clear direction in either thread sort of hampered my investment in the story overall. It might be partly for this reason that I didn't really connect with the supporting characters in their sections either. Most of them felt fairly distinct, though a couple of them did blur together for me on Gehrin's side, possibly due to the fact that they're sometimes referenced by two different names.
The character I found most interesting was Gehrin's older brother, Xario. While you could probably make the argument that his motivations were also highly influenced by his surroundings, his arc still felt the strongest to me in that he seems to have a very clear sense of who he is and who he wants to be despite all the extraneous forces pushing and pulling him in different directions. We get so little time with him in comparison to other characters, but whenever his chapters rolled around, I was always very excited to see what would happen with him. The sections featuring Master Lohi were also quite interesting, though I found the reasoning behind his incredibly twisted actions to be rather thin or at least ambiguous. Some of this could be due to the fact that we don't really see his machinations come to full fruition, so perhaps future books will do more to show the method to his cold, calculating madness (or at least serve to justify the heartlessness of his actions in this book).
PLOT/TONE
As with Tecken's debut, PHASED, this book is very much more of a character piece as opposed to one that has a strong sense of narrative direction. Similar to her previous book, a lot of connections are made toward the end and there is certainly an easily identifiable climax. Because this is meant to function as the beginning of something much larger though, I found myself markedly less satisfied with the way things wrapped up. This story is on the shorter side of the epic fantasy, which at least made the open-endedness of the conclusion a little less frustrating than it would have been in a longer book. Even with that though, it was hard not to feel as though the story was only just beginning by the time the novel ended. I do feel like some of this probably circles back to my previous statements about the two main characters and the lack of agency or direction that they had. Both Gehrin and Syndri have experiences which are quite shocking, but a lot of that didn't have the emotional impact on me that I think must have been intended. For Syndri, this was simply due to my lack of investment in her as a character. For Gehrin, I think I kept getting hung up on the nature of his training and indoctrination. The whole situation that he ends up in is alarmingly sadistic and I definitely felt for him, but I kept thinking to myself how the end result would not be what Master Lohi and his peers intended. Maybe it's because I recently read THE ART OF WAR, which speaks a lot to inspiring loyalty while still commanding absolute obedience among troops, but I felt quite strongly that the method for creating Bruhai should not work. For a very long time during the story, it seemed like I was right, and in at least one case I was, but there are some twists at the end where it felt like Lohi's vision suddenly snapped into place even though there was no real indication of that being where the story was going. Perhaps the sudden change was a purposeful one, but my understanding of brainwashing is that it is a fairly slow process that doesn't involve a sudden change in thinking such that the victim's entire personality shifts in an instant (to be fair, there is a time skip near the end, so perhaps the change was less spontaneous than I perceived it to be). Obviously, I don't really know for sure since I've never been brainwashed or brainwashed someone, but I think this is all to say that I got extremely distracted on the plausibility and logistics of Gehrin's situation when perhaps I should have just gone with the flow and tried to enjoy the story more.
SETTING/WORLD
As far as fantasy settings go, this world is an interesting enough one. It seems fairly similar to our own in the sense that there aren't any alien creatures who dwell upon it or any exotic fauna that adorn the landscape. I got the sense that the northern and southern portions of the world (or at least this part of it) were vaguely inspired by different Asian cultures. I wouldn't say either was particularly evocative of any real-world destination in particular, but there were some small details here and there which seemed to point to parts of East Asia serving as a muse for the fictional societies which are crafted for this story. Along these lines, I do wish we'd gotten slightly more detail in terms of what this world is really like. The basic fundamentals of the law and the way that things work in each society are all clearly laid out for us and we even get little tidbits of information about the religious beliefs of the south, but I found myself wanting to know more about the "mundane" aspects of what it is really like to live here. What people eat, what the terrain and weather are like, what types of opportunities exist outside of politicking and war, and what people do for fun were all little details that I think would have made the characters and world feel that much more alive. In spite of the character-centric nature of the story, we mostly only see the characters in one stressful (and presumably unusual) situation after another. This left little time to get an understanding of what the world is like for normal people outside of a couple of scenes with Gehrin early on in the book. In terms of the terrain, I don't think I needed Tolkien-levels of detail on this aspect of the world, but I would have liked to have a clearer picture of what the architecture and layout of the imperial city looked like or what the landscape of the south consisted of. I think it also would have been helpful just to know how close or far all the different places were from one another.
Rounding things out were some light political intrigue elements. I found all of this to be perfectly believable even if a lot of the finer points were left undefined and I think I would have liked for this to be a somewhat larger focus of the story. We get most of this through Xario and Lohi early on, but Syndri's arc starts to show us a different side of world affairs toward the second half of the book as well. One thing I found particularly interesting was that there's this sort of juxtaposition between the very outward brutality of the various tribes and the far more "civilized" violence of the powers that exist within the empire. It's not a theme that's shoved in reader's faces or anything, but I thought that the ideas presented here were really fun to ponder. The Emperor himself is a fascinating individual and the way his political plotting comes to a head in the story's climax felt brilliantly executed. As the series continues, I hope it delves a little more into these aspects of the world and sort of centers the plot a bit more around these different points of conflict. It seems like things might be trending that way based on where this book leaves off, but we'll have to wait and see where the author takes the narrative from here whenever the next book is written.
AUDIOBOOK
The fact that this book is narrated by Andrew D. Meredith was a big draw for me as I have really enjoyed the narration work he's done for his own books and I was curious to see how he'd do with someone else's story. The results were mostly excellent as I'd hoped. I realized while listening that I have definitely come to associate certain narrators with specific series. I think I will be very thrown off if I ever hear Michael Kramer or Kate Reading perform on a book that isn't written by Sanderson because I found it slightly odd to hear Meredith's voice narrating character lines and prose in a similar way to his work on THE KALLATIAN SAGA, but for a book that is quite distinct from his own. Thankfully, the strangeness subsided quickly and I think he did a wonderful job of bringing the story to life. I will note that there were some occasional blips in the audio tracks where it seemed like things were maybe cut together a little strangely or where the voicework sounded sort of robotic for brief moment. Minor grievances aside, I really love the way that Meredith delivers stories to the listener and appreciate some of the little flourishes he adds like the music that starts and ends the book or the way he does voicework for lines delivered by a crowd. I certainly hope to see him return for the eventual sequels to this book if those are also given the audio treatment.
CONCLUSION
When all is said and done, I'm afraid I ended up enjoying this one a little less than others have and less than I'd hoped, but I still had a reasonably good time and I think there's a lot of potential in this series. I'm curious to see where the author goes with it now that it seems like a lot of the key pieces are in place for the story to take off in some truly interesting directions.
(+) Gehrin is easy to root for and I found Xario to be deeply compelling
(+) The shades of political intrigue that we got were tantalizing and quite fun
(+) I really enjoyed contemplating the different themes around each of the societies
(+) The ending sets up a lot of amazing potential for subsequent books to build off of
(+) A predominantly excellent audio experience (especially after I adjusted to things)
(-) I found myself not connecting with or understanding Syndri or Lohi as much as I'd have liked
(-) I had a hard time feeling invested in the major story arcs for different reasons
(-) The narrative elements surrounding the Bruhai felt like they snapped into place too quickly
(-) I felt as though the world could have been built up a little more so as to feel more "real"
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- EL Montague
- 04-12-24
An epic tale of fate and fortune.
I enjoyed spending a couple of weeks with the characters of the Blood Stones. They were wrought with careful thought and the care of a mother. I am anxious to see what becomes of them.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- iSamwise
- 01-07-25
Fantastic slow burn Dothraki inspired fantasy.
The first thing to say about this book is that it is a self published book and absolutely in no way reads like one. I’ve read enough self pub that sometimes within a single paragraph you can tell that they didn’t have enough editors or passes at it for the writing to feel smooth and professional. If I didn’t know that Tori had self published this, I wouldn’t have figured it out from the text itself.
Overall this book reminded me STRONGLY of two other books. It reminded me a lot of A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham and the Dothraki portions of A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin.
The GoT comparison is easy as one of the main plots here deals with a nomadic, Mongol style tribe of horse folk. However the Daniel Abraham comparison is a bit more nuanced. It comes down to the tone of the book and the pacing. The whole time I was reading this I thought to myself “people who love A Shadow in Summer would love this book too (Allen)”. The political back and forth, the plots within plots, the deliberate pacing as things are slowly revealed, etc.
It definitely is a book one, and so there’s a lot of things that don’t come together by the end, but it leaves me excited for how things will go in book two!
If I had to give a negative there are three things I’d say, and they’re all minor.
First I didn’t love the audiobook. It’s not bad (and believe me, self pub books having an audiobook lends TONS of credibility to the work) but it’s not amazing. The reading is ok but even some of the side characters had more memorably distinct voices than main characters. (And there were some technical goofs. Repeated phrases, different audio levels, etc. ) Not horrible but I’ll be physically reading book two personally.
Secondly 70% of the worldbuilding is fantastic (like more believable than many mainstream fantasy books I’ve read) but some of the lore was confusing and some things I felt a bit lost in. Maybe that would’ve better if I’d physically read it.
Last of all is a REAL nitpick and it’s the audiobooks fault, but not because of the reader. Hear me out. There’s a deity character that I believe is also supposed to be the sun that’s called “Aqatar” which is pronounced exactly like ACOTAR the acronym for A Court of Thorns and Roses. So that was distracting a bit, but it did make me laugh. Haha.
Despite my nitpicks, this is a great book. The ending was fantastic and Tori is a remarkably polished author who I definitely plan on reading more of!!
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