 Hey guys it's Leanna and I'm here today to talk about Ink by Alice Broadway. This book is Major Yikes. I... okay story time about why I even picked this up. So this book when it came out like a year ago, I guess I could check the publication date. Books have those on there. I feel like it was like a year or two ago? January 2018. Okay so like not quite a year and a half. I remember when it came out like thinking it looked like the bomb diggity because like look at this fucking cover. Like this is one of the most gorgeous books I've ever seen actually. This cover like the jacket is cool and then the naked book is also like freaking stunning. So there's a lot of rustling in there so you're welcome for that. So yeah it looked really cool and then I looked I remember skimming the premise and it being like about it's like a fantasy dystopian. I wasn't exactly sure and I'm still not sure and I've read it so there you go. Kind of fantasy dystopian kind of thing. Yeah I remember when it came out being like oh yeah and then I forgot about it and also so did everyone else. So which should have been like my first warning though like maybe I shouldn't pick this up because like where even is it. But at the same time there's other books that like have like been forgotten by the hype train and I love them. Like The Diabolic love that book and when it came out it got like all the hype and now like I've never seen anyone talk about it. I love The Diabolic so you know you never know but yeah so the reason I even stumbled across this again was because I recently listened to a different audio book and one of the narrators of that audio book I really liked so that I like searched Audible like by the narrator and she narrated this one and I was like oh yeah that book I like totally forgot that was a thing. But I remember wanting to read that and I have a credit and I really like this narrator so let's do it. When I first finished this book I gave it a three stars because and like honestly literally like within an hour I changed it to two because I was like lulled into thinking it was okay by the narrator who was really good. So she has this like lovely mild slightly like Irish lilt and her voice just sounds so reasonable. So like when she was reading this story a lot of it doesn't make sense but when she would read it she just sounded so reasonable and nice and I just liked her voice and I was like well the Irish lady is saying it so it must be fine. And then when I had some time to digest it and like I was like so what did I just read and I was like none of that made sense like literally none of that. That was actually so dumb so I was tricked by the nice narrator lady. Okay so it's pretty short book so I shouldn't have a ton to say but I think I ranted about A Court of Frost and Starlight for like half an hour and that book said novella. Oh god that book still makes me angry. Anyway that's not what we're here to talk about. Um thank. This is the first book in a series. I have not read the rest of the series nor do I intend to read the rest of the series and I've had recent experience Brandon Sanderson with people telling me I can't judge things until I've read them in their entirety. I eat a whole series which I think is stupid. You absolutely can and should judge things both individually and as a series. Like people who see the Star Wars movies they rate the Star Wars movies individually and then also as a whole. Those are like two different conversations. Anyway that's also not what we're here to talk about but yeah that. So this is the first book in a series. I don't know where the rest of this goes. I really don't care. I'm just here to talk about the first one. And to talk you out of picking up this series. If you want to pick it up go ahead. I mean let me all send you this one because this is super pretty. But dang. Dang. Okay so like per usual I didn't plan to do a review or a rant or anything. Like I never go into something expecting to dislike it so I never like decide that it might be worth it to take notes until either after the fact or at best halfway through and then it's kind of too late. And I'm never ever gonna reread something that I hated just to take notes. Sorry I don't love you that much. If you want to pay me to do that then maybe I will. But I'm doing this for free y'all so spending hours reading this once and not liking it is plenty. So yeah the premise is pretty much what I said. What did I even say? The part about it being tattoos I don't even remember. But based on the title that should come as no surprise. It's like tattoos in a magical and or dystopian situation. That's all I know. That's all I knew going into it. That's still all I know. Nothing happens in this book. Like nothing. Literally nothing. And that said a very good writer can make nothing very interesting if what they're doing with like even though maybe nothing's happening plot wise like there's not a lot of events. If what the author is doing is like a really interesting examination and discussion of like a situation. Kind of like just like painting a a portrait in words. I'm all about that. Like that'd be great. And part of the reason that I do like Name of the Wind and why other people do not is because Patrick Rothes does it all the time. If you listed like a timeline of events like what happens in Name of the Wind there's I mean it's a long book. So like there's there's stuff that happens for sure. Quite a few things that happen. But for such a long book actually not a lot happens in terms of again like a timeline. But Patrick Rothes I think personally what I enjoy about his writing is how beautifully he sort of paints the scene paints like a character's mindset a situation. Like he's just like painting a beautiful portrait of every single event and I just really enjoy the experience of it. Not everyone likes that. And this book didn't even do that. So what I'm basically what I'm trying to say is just because nothing happens isn't necessarily gonna mean that I hate the book. In this case nothing happened and it was bad. So so basically this is in like I think the future of our world. I think it's pretty unclear but they seem sorry I'm checking if there's a map. There is not. They seem very British. They're slang and like their obsession with tea. It's not just because the narrator was Irish sounding like I feel like this is meant to be like a dystopian Britain. If not actually dystopian Britain then based on that I don't know it's very unclear. Plus plus plus. The book also weaves in a ton of like fairy tales that we would recognize. Fables fairy tales folklore even myth like Greek myth but it's retold in a way that fits this world and it's not cleverly done. So I was gonna say like if you wrote a book that's kind of almost like a parallel universe where you see all of these stories you do recognize but they're all like twisted on their head that could be super interesting. There's a lot of things this book like the idea of it I was like that could be done really well by someone that who's not Alice Broadway. Because I see I think I know what you were trying to do. Maybe you weren't and I'm giving you too much credit. There's like stuff in there that someone else could handle very well. Like there's it's an interesting concept you just executed so poorly. So yeah in a way it's a sort of a way to flesh out the world if you I can't I don't really want to call it a world because that implies world building and there's practically none but a way to sort of understand these people's belief system and culture and like why the f they're tattooing themselves that's basically told to you kind of through character interactions but a lot of it is through these like retold fairy tales which are stories that these people read kind of biblically but also not it's very strange. I'm all about not info dumping like I love when a world is sort of organically introduced to you or you don't have like three pages of exposition explaining to you the religion or the culture but this wasn't done very well so I'm super confused. Okay so I'm just tired of holding it up and it's super shiny so basically I'm well the situation as I understand it is that everybody tattoos themselves with everything that happens in their life all their life events all their decisions who they are what they do there's certain tattoos that are sort of obligatory like kind of like we have birth certificates and stuff like that that like you don't get to choose whether you have one like everyone has a birth certificate everyone in the US has a social security card like you just have these things so there's certain tattoos that are like that that are kind of like government standard issue that marks certain things like facts about you on your body and then later in your life you're supposed to keep tattooing yourself with everything like there's like tattoos that mark your family and then if someone in that family dies then the tattoo gets updated to reflect that like your job your if you've killed someone like it's all on your body it feels almost like it's kind of it's taken the idea of the way that like Russian mafia tattoos tell the story of a person on their body if you know if you understand the symbols it's kind of taken that and made it like a whole culture which is kind of weird and dumb because the Russian mob doesn't do this in order to help the government which is kind of how this is set up where basically the government's position is you should have nothing to hide so you should be willing to put your whole life story on your body because we're all about transparency and honesty um and like what have you got to hide if you have something to hide then you're a criminal and like it's sort of this like moral high ground of everyone with these tattoos they're like I have no shame in my life and I will put it on display and we're like keeping each other honest that way but what's weird is that apart from the government standard issue like when you're born like your name stuff like this like it seems like every tattoo you get through your life like it's kind of on you to go and get it it's like voluntary and I just don't fucking understand why people would be that people aren't that honest they just are not so it's it's structured in a way that's very loose like for this to actually work I would have I would picture a really rigid society where you're constantly monitored and everything you do immediately there's like a tattoo artist ready to go to tattoo it on you but it's not it's people like going to tattoo shops like more frequently than we have in our real world but it's basically the same they go to the tattoo shop and they're like this is what I had in mind I kind of wanted this to mark the fact that my baby is born so can you do that and they'll like talk about the design and then do it and I'm like if it was painted as just like the culture like is into this it would be different but it's like literally the government is into this like it's like a government job to be a tattoo artist the government is pro tattoos so it's just it doesn't work like it needs to be either more rigid for it to be a government thing or it needs to be not a government thing where people are just kind of like this culture is more into tattoos than we're used to in our culture but it's like a whole thing beyond that too because it's also a religious thing because so they're all inked um and the enemy culture are the blanks i.e people that don't have tattoos of any kind and they're like oh my god that's so shady that like what do you have to hide if like why aren't you willing to tattoo your life story on your body like how terrifying it is to meet someone and look at them and not know anything about them because it's not tattooed on their skin so the blanks are like the bogeyman and like the government's like you know watch out for the blanks and i was like i guess that's kind of a cool concept like the idea that you have something to hide if you don't tattoo yourself but again the way this is structured it just doesn't make sense and it doesn't work so at its core like the the kernel of an idea there that having tattoos is inherently honest and not having them you have something to hide like just that by itself like okay you could take that and you could run with it and you could make something out of it but this isn't that something it's not it's terrible okay and so like where did this start we also get sort of like a origin story for like their faith in tattoos and it's kind of like a fairy tale but there's like these two sisters that like they're just nice and half forget exactly how the story goes but their dad is dying and he's like one regret in life is that once he dies his story is dies with him there's no record of him and so he wishes that his daughters would be able to have their stories told like permanently or some bullshit like that and so when he dies the one sister suddenly all of her life events started peering on her skin like magically so she's not going to a tattoo artist to get this done because she's like dad in your honor i'm gonna go and tattoo myself no she like is magically happening where they just appear on her skin and again if this book worked like that where everybody like it just magically happened that would function better it would be a whole different like the idea of it being voluntary is where the morality question comes in but it just doesn't work so the only way for this to work is if in this book it was magically appearing like involuntarily anyway in the origin story it's involuntary and so she like marries a prince and um her sister is like now living in obscurity and then she goes to visitor sister and her sister is blank she doesn't have these tattoos appearing on her and she's like oh that's weird and bad so it's basically sleeping beauty because they the marked sister she like has a baby with the prince and they don't invite the blank sister to the christening even though like everyone on the planet at that moment is also blank because it's only this princess who magically has them appearing on her skin so everyone is blank except for like her except for her but her sister is the evil one anyway they don't invite evil blank sis and evil blank sis maleficent style does show up and is like i'm gonna curse your baby to pierce her finger on a spinning wheel at 16 and die and like someone else is like a fairy and is like no she's just gonna sleep for a hundred years and then there's like a cheeky thing about how when the princess wakes up at 16 is woken by a prince she's like thanks for waking me up but like i'm 16 so like maybe i'll marry you someday maybe not let's cool it because i'm 16 and i think it was supposed to be like one of those like modern like yeah that's a better story but i think it's so weird and dumb that i was like okay whatever this is all like a weird completely fairy tale type thing where you just accept a lot of strangeness like that but all of a sudden we're getting real and we're like whoa i just met you i'm 16 i'm like okay the rest of the story was weird but now we're getting real anyway so that's like their origin story and like this blank sister who's the evil one is known as the white witch and she's like the first blank so she's kind of like the devil and um there are still blanks living like um i don't know like outside the city i don't exactly like in commune i think not super sure they don't have access to like food and medicine and so like they're like the rebel enemy and basically there's like the government is always saying that the blanks are trying to infiltrate society and trying to like destroy everything good and they want war and blah blah blah fear the blanks so our main character her dad dies and oh yeah so this is the super gross part everybody's skin like all of their tatted skin the government employees who are basically like government morticians they're called flares because once you die they peel your skin off of your dead body and form a book out of that marked skin and then give it to your family as like a way to remember you so that's why they're like the blanks are like bad because when they die there's no way to remember them like you didn't exist if no one remembers you so like at her house she's got our main character she's got like grandma and grandpa skin books and blah blah blah and so like now this like basically the whole plot if there is one revolves around getting their hands on dad's skin book because there's some shadiness about some tat that she saw that he had when she was a kid and wasn't supposed to see and now it's like a whole thing because she goes to this government it's kind of like a public hanging only it's a public tattooing of this guy who's getting this tattoo that's marking him as a forgotten so even though he's alive and gets to live the rest of his life I guess they're just going to burn his skin book because that too once your skin book is everyone gets their skin made into a book and then once that book is made then other government employees review the contents of that book to like weigh your soul and if they deem it good then they give the skin book to your family and if they don't then they burn it which I'm like it's just so weird like I don't even I don't understand like do you know what I mean like I don't get it anyway so Armin her just really worried about getting her dad's skin book because yeah when this guy is getting marked as the for as a forgotten she recognizes the tat because she like saw her dad he like uh something fell on his head or something years ago and he had to get stitched up and she remembers like seeing beneath his hair or wherever the stitches went through that he had that same tat and she's like oh shit oh shit my dad is a forgotten what oh yeah I assume you guys don't care about spoilers so I'm gonna be spoiling the twists if you can call them that which are super dumb so she's oh and this is also where I'm confused if this is magic or not because it seems like everyone's just going around getting tatted like normal like there's like a needle and ink and you get tatted because you choose to do it it's not magically appearing the government wants you to do this it's all like it could happen like they wouldn't because it's dumb but like it it's possible so there's also people who are readers and she and her mother are very like naturally good readers i.e. they can look at someone's skin and like understand them and like read their story from their skin and this isn't told like this isn't painted as being something like you just learn you're really good at like the like you've memorized the symbolism like if someone read a bunch of Russian mafia tattoos and were like they know the symbol so they can look at somebody's body and immediately recognize it all no because these tats aren't standard issue so it's literally looking it's kind of like a palm reading of like they can tell a lot about you by reading your tattoos and it's told us like it's like magical almost like when she walks down the street she can almost like read people as she goes and it's like kind of distracting um it's like a kind of like a telekinetic like telepathic palm reading of people's tattoos which seems quite magical but i don't fucking know um so she goes to apprentice with this like tattoo artist because that's what she wants her job to be and she can't read him and she finds that strange and then later you find out that he's a blank sympathizer and that he's just marked up his body basically with a sharpie so that he'll blend in but he can wash it all off and he's not actually marked which is why she couldn't read him which is why this has to be a magical thing and not just like i'm good at reading symbols because if you're good at reading symbols you can read them whether they're inked into skin or are made of sharpie like you can if that was all it was so there's something like magical about it being actually marked in your flesh that is why she's able to read you which is again not explained so um she finds out that not only is this like tattoo artist a blank sympathizer the reason her dad had this tattoo and stuff her dad was also a blank sympathizer because her dad had a child with a blank woman and the blank woman is a direct descendant of the white witch which is why like she's she our main character goes to like museums and stuff and sees pictures again not photographs just like artist renderings of the white witch and is like oh my god she looks like me and finds out that this is like a thousand years ago that the white witch existed and she then finds out that she's the daughter of not the woman she's been calling mother for her whole life but this blank woman who's a direct descendant of the white witch and can we just talk about genetics for a second because like if i was related to genghis Khan i wouldn't look like genghis Khan it's been many many generations so that's just not how that works but she's like apparently super identical to the white witch and her dad had this baby i think the blank woman dies because she like gives up her baby and um the woman who this our main character thought was her mother all these years had adopted that baby because she felt like it kind of like on the black market i'm very confused and but meanwhile her actual dad is trying to find this baby and when he finally finds the baby with this woman they're like not actually romantically involved at first and then like they get married so they can both have the baby and then they do actually kind of wall in love and so he's been working kind of as like a blank sympathizer within within society to like help get them supplies and so all these people are coming out of the woodwork now that her dad is dead to try to be like you got to do that now like help us the way your dad did and i'm just like why did no one tell her that this was what her dad like there's no sense of her family's kind of secretly always been a little more positive towards the blanks to kind of ease her into it her life has been like totally normal we hate the blanks blah blah blah all of a sudden dad dies and everyone's like so the blanks aren't so bad you know and she's like what yes they are they're the evil they're the devil they're like no your dad's in with us with them and you're one of them and she's like what the fuck and i was like yeah you would be like what the fuck because all these people are expecting her to like help and like the dad had apparently expected that too that someday she would and i was just like why wouldn't you tell her any of this ever like i don't understand the logic here like either you've decided that she's just gonna live in inked society and never know anything about this so just that's just how it is it's fine or you need to be prepping her for this because i don't know why this is a reveal why she doesn't know this and then the way that the characters other characters trust her because she clearly doesn't know anything about this like she's not it's very obvious they kind of test her to see if she knows and she is very clear she has no fucking idea and she's very pro government like very pro government and they just decide to like tell her all this stuff and out themselves as blank sympathizers and i'm like why i would not she clearly doesn't care about you or about your cause like this is ridiculous and that's exactly what she does when it comes to like her dad's like weighing of his book ceremony that's when all this reveal happens that like this is who she really is in front of every fucking one and she's angry and she's tells the government to burn the book and all these other people are like how could you do that you betrayed us and your father and she's like y'all didn't tell me any of this shit about who i really am about my blank mother so i was pissed and then the government is like yeah we were following you all along we just wanted to see if you were actually loyal to us and you are and she's like yeah i am but the blank sympathizers are still talking to her and being like you gotta help us and i was like why she's just proven pretty much beyond it she told them the the government to burn her dad's book and it wasn't because she thought she was being tested she did it because she felt like it it wasn't like i knew they were watching so i did this she's like no i did this because i was mad i don't know who i meant to be sympathizing with here and i don't none of the characters choices make sense like i get why she's pissed but like i don't she doesn't really have much of a personality beyond being pissed about finding this out everyone around her is just telling her stuff and i don't know why and the way that the society is structured makes no goddamn sense at all and then the way that like the reason the blanks aren't in ink society like the reason this tattoo artist is like covered in fake tattoos and refuses to actually get real tattoos is because he doesn't want it to be mandated like he doesn't he thinks you should be free to make this choice it's like a pro-choice kind of argument and but meanwhile all these people are like apparently starving on the outskirts of society because they refuse to get inked and i'm like why like i'm it doesn't sound like freedom is all like great so if i guess if it's that important to you but it makes it sound like it's not like a fringe group of like a handful of people who are extremists like there's like a big amount of people who are all blank because they refuse to get chatted and i'm like the government all they're asking you to do is put tattoos on for your life events and it's completely other than the standard issue ones it's totally voluntary so just go live your life and get a few tattoos the ones the government requires and then you'll have food and medicine i don't understand what the big deal is like i feel like you might want to stage some protests maybe like circulating some pamphlets questioning whether we really do need these chats but is it enough to starve over apparently it is i don't get it i don't see the big deal maybe that's just me i'm more pragmatic than apparently the the blanks are so where it leaves off is like our main character is like she's found all this out and that's like that's the plot her dad dies in the beginning and she's like going to work for this tattoo artist and like finds out that her she was actually secretly half blank and that's it that's the plot it's not a plot like a reveal isn't a plot a reveal is something that happens in a plot so if there was like a bunch of other stuff going on and like the catalyst for it was her finding this out that would be a thing or if there's a bunch of other stuff going on and then at the end she finds this out and it changes her total perspective on everything else she was doing but it's not the whole plot is her slowly piecing together this relatively obvious reveal and then it ended like if this if that had been like the prologue because i know this is the first book in a series which is why i brought that up earlier but that's not enough for a whole first book yes a first book sets things up but they it also has to like set up a plot it has you know what i mean like it's not like it's super long like it could have been a bit longer if you needed some time to actually have a plot i don't get it i don't get it at all it was so dumb it was so dumb it feels like there was like a cool concept in there the idea of tattoos versus blanks versus you know something showing your life story versus something to hide remembering people like the the skin books thing is like super creepy but like it's kind of an interesting concept but either that's just enough for like a short story where you just kind of explore those ideas real quick but to flesh it out into a full novel you really really do need to have fleshed it out and she didn't and then you actually have to have a plot which she didn't and i'm just this is so beautiful this book this is so pretty i wanted to love this but this is just a hot mess i don't understand any of it i don't understand anything about it she was so dumb and i kept saying the main character because i don't remember the character's name that's how memorable she was her name is just say on the jacket please tell me liora her name is liora so yeah don't read that is my advice to you let me know the comments down below if you've read that book what you thought of it if i've talked to you out of it whatever you want to tell me i post videos on saturdays so like and subscribe and i'll see you next saturday bye