How do you top a great headining band going on a reunion tour? Simple, you don’t. You try something a little different. You tell a story of the next generation. In this case, Bloody Rose is the daughter of Golden Gabe, one of the members of the band Saga, who took center stage in Nicholas Eames’ rollicking debut Kings of the Wyld. In fact, Rose helped drive the action in Kings of the Wyld, as her abduction set Gabe into action and reunited Saga. Even more off-the-expected, the heroine of the title – Bloody Rose – is not our primary point-of-view character. Rather, Tam, the young and hopeful bard who joins Bloody Rose’s band Fable, is whose viewpoint provides the major character journey of Bloody Rose.
Tam Hashford is tired of working at her local pub, slinging drinks for world-famous mercenaries and listening to the bards sing of adventure and glory in the world beyond her sleepy hometown.
When the biggest mercenary band of all rolls into town, led by the infamous Bloody Rose, Tam jumps at the chance to sign on as their bard. It’s adventure she wants – and adventure she gets as the crew embark on a quest that will end in one of two ways: glory or death.
Tam is tired of her boring life at home, she’s a barmaid and hears stories about and serves many of the traveling bands who fight monsters in the arena. She wants to be a bard like her mother, but her father is overprotective. As is par for the course, that overprotective nature only serves to push Tam away and out of the house. When Bloody Rose and Fable ask her to join their band as the bard, Tam is thrilled beyond measure. She’s essentially living her dream life; think of a popular band plucking the singer of a cover band to take over for the lead singer. Kind of Tim “Ripper” Owens being asked to sing for Judas Priest when Rob Halford left the band, which served as the inspiration for Marky Mark Wahlberg’s film, Rock Star.
Life in a band (of marauders, essentially) who live like the rock bands of our world is much more challenging than Tam expected. She finds herself part of the action, fighting monsters like a cyclops more than she finds herself on the sideline observing for the songs she will later write and sing about the band. She didn’t expect to find herself attracted to Cura, the Inkwitch of the band, though she always knew she preferred girls. But lets get back to that Inkwitch, not exactly a new character type Eames has given, but a sorcerer or witch whose tattoos come to life and fight on her command is interesting and given extra weight because of the character’s backstory. Rounding out Saga are Brune the shapeshifter/shaman, and Freecloud the druin (Eames’s elves, essentially) who also happens to be Rose’s lover.
I haven’t even touched on Bloody Rose yet, have I? Well, she sure is an over-the-top character. Seeing her actions through Tam’s point of view paints a picture that is initially quite intimidating. Driven by her powerful desire to make a name for herself beyond the shadow of her father, the great Golden Gabe of Saga, Rose pushes herself to lengths beyond what a normal person should be able to do. She’s killed cyclopses and other monsters, but has her eyes on the biggest, baddest monster in the land, the Simurg, also known as Dragoneater; the largest dragon in the world. She’ll confront this monster regardless of any cost, all she needs is to be pointed in the correct direction of where the Dragoneater lives.
There’s more beyond that, of course, given the novel is just over 500 pages long, but part of the fun is in discovering the story as it unfolds. What I can say is that along the way, Eames does many things very well in the story. Each of the members of Fable get a chance to shine as the hero of their own story. Eames seamlessly intertwines each character’s journey into the greater novel itself.
Although Bloody Rose is set in the same world as Kings of the Wyld six years after the conclusion of the novel and features some of those characters (i.e. a major plotline in Kings of the Wyld was Gabe’s quest to save Rose), the novel can work on its own.
Eames’s tells his story in a very easy-going fashion which ultimately, exudes a great sense of fun. That said, Eames tackles some headier themes, of bad parents, PTSD, abuse, becoming a parent, and how responsibility can be smoothed over. Sure, he’s having a lot of fun with the story, but the story also has Some Things To Say.
I came about a year late to Kings of the Wyld, but when I read it earlier in the year, I felt like it was written exactly for me. One doesn’t always get that direct connection from a book, but I did with Kings of the Wyld. Upon finishing it, I was craving Bloody Rose and boy did it deliver. This is a bad-ass, rocking adventure. Call me crazy, but I can see the fantastic Lzzy Hale (of the great band Halestorm) as Bloody Rose.
This is a supremely enjoyable novel and I really hope Eames has more stories to tell in this world and about these characters.
© 2018 Rob H. Bedford
August 2018 | Orbit
508 Pages | Trade Paperback
http://nicholaseames.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor
Excerpt: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/bloody-rose/
