Bitter Ends SFINCS

by GJ Terral

Bitter Ends is an interesting novella which takes place before the main series and this reads more like a prologue than a prequel. Now, the premise is not really all that new with a dark academy setting which is training a group of assassins and they have something which reminds me of the blood magic in Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestors trilogy. Now, this book is very short so you don’t have time to explore magic systems and what not, but this was a close reminder of me and the next thing I could compare it to.

You follow one of these kids and it starts with him mkaing a rational decision of pushing his mother off a building. Not really. But someone is pushed. He gets acosted for it, and there’s this whole thing about who these very minor characters are but we don’t get into their heads as to why they’re doing the things they’re doing.

None of these children chose the fate of going to school to kill people and he’s presented with the question, and coming from a religious connotation in a way, a cultural taboo of not asking questions. In Christian circles for instance, if you suggest The Bible is not the word of God, you’ll get your ear swollen. Now, in a more historical setting, you cannot say, like in Korea, that the President of Korea can do anything wrong without getting hanged yourself. There is this subtle world building done in snippets to explain the severity of the world the characters are in.

Now for me, let me start off with a few things I didn’t care for. The character development was lackluster, in my opinion. The only person I really felt a connection to was Tomas, but he seemed to be more flushed out than our main character, Dennick.

I didn’t have an issue with the prose and thought it was probably the strong point for the novella up until the inclusing of the F-bombs. Now, if you’ve read anything I’ve written, I’m no stranger to the curse. But here is where I find issue: to me it read quite like the target audience was more for middle grade, and maybe scratched the surface into YA before the inclusion of the f-bomb. Now, I’m not a parent, but if I was, I wouldn’t want my kids reading this because of it. Now, this was shocking to me because there were opportunities of grit throughout the novella to set the tone and it missed that opportunity. There were some metaphors that sang well, and some that missed the mark completely.

The world building was there and I felt that the world building done in this book was probably intended to do work the other books didn’t do. To me, much of the grandiose building wasn’t there. I don’t know how big the world is, what kind of world I’m in, and I presume there are only humans in this place and so on. So, I think reading the other books first might be the move.

This is a novella, so I can’t really talk about the plot because then you might not want to read it, and despite its short comings, it was enjoyable if long. It kind of reminds of Chima Williams, “Demon King” where it started off painstakingly slow, but when you’re 300 pages in, it starts to really sing for you.

You can check it out here