I was invited to participate in the SPFBO (Self Published Fantasy Blog Off) Champions League review by Mihir over at Fantasy Book Critic. As part of this invitation, I was given the opportunity to select one of the 10 SPFBO winners from first 10 years of the contest and bring a new set of eyes to review one of these books. I’d read a couple of the books in this group of 10 books previously. JL Odom’s By Blood, By Salt stood out to me after I did a quick scan of reviews of the book and I saw people draw comparisons to Robin Hobb, one of my favorite writers. Perhaps that is an unfairly high bar to set for any writer.
J.L. Odom’s debut novel By Blood, By Salt, a Military Fantasy novel, the first of the Land of Exile series. The story focuses on a military unit on a mission, led by Azetla who is an outsider, a “jackal.” While Azetla has been in the military for over a dozen years as a debt soldier, he is an outcast because of his outsider nature. This mission: catch a Sahr devil, a brutal desert inhabitant. Seems a straight-forward enough assignment, but of course it is not because this Sahr Devil is a skilled warrior and far more than anybody expected them to be.
Azetla has served the Maurowan Army for thirteen years. There are seven left to pay. A pariah and a debt soldier, he is a commander with no rank, a soldier without citizenship, and wears a sword that it is unlawful for him to either own or use. He has learned to hold his tongue or risk losing everything.
When Azetla’s battalion is sent into the desert to catch a Sahr devil—one of the famously brutal inhabitants of the region—his tenuous position is threatened. He discovers that there is far more to this mission than catching a fiend. For the Emperor of Maurow, it is a way to prove that he fears nothing, not even devils. For the Emperor’s brother, it is a stepping-stone to rebellion. For Azetla it could be deadly either way, as he is cornered into choosing a side in the coming coup.
But the devil that Azetla finds in the desert is not what anyone expects or wants. As the conspiracy against the Emperor becomes entangled with the simmering ambitions of the desert tribes, Azetla must decide if he’s willing to strike a bargain with a devil in order to survive.
Naturally, she is not to be trusted. But then again, neither is he.
Azetla is a highly-skilled leader and military mind, he commands respect from his own people especially his battalion. His captain overlooks the fact that Azetla is seen as a “lower race” because of the benefits and glory Azetla’s leadership can bring. Unfortunately, other men in the military company try to undermine Azetla whenever opportunities present themselves. Odom draws a lot of enthralling political drama out of this situation and part of why it is so effective is because Azetla is an empathetic, well-realized protagonists.
Then there’s the “Sahr devil,” a complex individual. As well as Odom built the character of Azetla, there was something extra about the Sahr devil. Other characters in the military group feared and hated the Sahr devil and didn’t quite know what to make of them. The layers of this character are revealed with the precision and patience of a practiced craftsperson…in other words, very impressive for a debut novelist.
Another element that impressed me was the vibrancy of the world. Superficially it was a desert landscape, but as Odom revealed more about the characters and where they originated, a picture of a diverse world began to emerge. There’s clearly a lot going on in this world from a societal and geographic perspective and the characters are the evidence of that.
While By Blood, By Salt has a great deal to admire and enjoy, I found the secondary characters to somewhat interchangeable and indistinct from each other. A few times I felt the need to backtrack in the novel to make sure I knew which characters were being referenced or interacting with each other. To be transparent, that could be on me… my attention span recently has been a little suspect, but as your humble reviewer, I strive for honesty. The strongest elements of the novel were the Sahr devil and Azetla, their interactions with each other and how other characters dealt with them and the actual plot seemed somewhat secondary at times. While the Sahr devil and Azetla were the largest characters in the novel, I think the novel may have been even stronger if some of the supporting characters were stripped away and the novel focused even more on them.
I noted the Robin Hobb comparison other reviewers have made, but about a third of the way into the novel something clicked for me, in terms of another writer/story that resonated with By Blood, By Salt. Carol Berg’s Rai-Kirah novels (the first of which is Transformation) have strong similarities especially in the similar “indentured” nature of their protagonists; both Azetla and Seyonne (the protagonist of the Rai-Kirah novels) are ill-respected because of their race but are elevated to stations of power amongst those who look down upon them. There is something about Odom’s prose and how she isn’t exactly kind to her protagonist that rings true with the Robin Hobb comparison, though.
In the end, while I found By Blood, By Salt to be uneven at times, it shows a lot of promise for J.L. Odom because the good parts were very good.
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
