by Mai Corland
512pp (Hardcover)
My Rating: 5/10
Amazon Rating: 4.4/5
LibraryThing Rating: 3.79/5
Goodreads Rating: 3.86/5
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It’s the season
for treason…The king of Yusan must die.
The five most dangerous liars in the land have been mysteriously summoned to work together for a single objective: to kill the God King Joon.
He has it coming. Under his merciless immortal hand, the nobles flourish, while the poor and innocent are imprisoned, ruined…or sold.
And now each of the five blades will come for him. Each has tasted bitterness―from the hired hitman seeking atonement, a lovely assassin who seeks freedom, or even the prince banished for his cruel crimes. None can resist the sweet, icy lure of vengeance.
They can agree on murder.
They can agree on treachery.
But for these five killers―each versed in deception, lies, and betrayal―it’s not enough to forge an alliance. To survive, they’ll have to find a way to trust each other…but only one can take the crown.
Let the best liar win.
Five Broken Blades, the first book in The Broken Blades series, was one of my most anticipated 2024 book releases. It sounded rather promising as a fantasy novel inspired by Korean myths and legends featuring deceptive, morally gray characters who form an unstable alliance—and multiple romances involving these characters with their penchants for treachery and betrayal.
Unfortunately, I found Five Broken Blades underwhelming in the end, despite being intrigued by where it was going toward the beginning. It kept me just curious enough to finish it: it was a quick read with short chapters, I was at least somewhat interested in one main character, and I thought maybe the conclusion would make it worthwhile. (It didn’t. It dragged when leading up to the Big Heist/Assassination Scene that was promised, and then that was rushed and not nearly as exciting as I’d hoped.) Given its overall lack of in-depth worldbuilding and characterization and the fragmented prose style, this was not a book for me and I have no plans to read the sequel (Four Ruined Realms, scheduled for January 2025).
Despite the number in the title, Five Broken Blades actually follows six characters brought together by a plot to steal a MacGuffin and kill a supposedly immortal god king. They are neatly split into three pairs with some sort of romantic dynamic:
- Instalove: The hardened hitman and the bubbly thief who hires the former as her bodyguard, who are immediately into each other.
- Potential Second Chance: The exiled prince and his ex-boyfriend, the king’s spymaster, who still have feelings for each other.
- Possible Enemies-to-Lovers (sort of, since it’s a bit one-sided and the milder, not-so-stabby version): The enslaved poison maiden and the son of the count who purchased and forged her, the latter of whom has been enchanted by the former for years while she sees him as a villain.
These all had potential to be interesting, but these first-person perspectives are all written in a choppy style that makes it easy to read but is bland since they’re similar. Furthermore, they lack nuance and the various characters’ traits become repetitive.
Sora, the poison maiden, was the only one of these characters I found at all compelling. She’s one of the few survivors of a group of girls who were created to literally kill with a kiss, able to wear lethal poisonous lipstick because of mithridatism, although the experience did leave her with hearing loss in one ear. An adult by the time the novel begins, she’s a courtesan/assassin who only remains obedient to the count who forced her into this role out of fear for her younger sister. Though Sora isn’t what I consider to be a terribly dimensional character, there is more to her than the others with her backstory, motivations, fierceness, and desire to create good where she can. (Plus I have a soft spot for characters who use being seen as harmless to their advantage.)
The other characters were a mix. Though he isn’t directly involved in the conspiracy and only gets chapters a bit later, I liked the count’s son well enough. His perspective meant more focus on Sora, and I’m also partial to characters like him: those who are under an authority figure’s control but try to find ways to keep things from being as bad as they could be under that person. The exiled prince and his ex-boyfriend were not all that memorable or compelling to me, even though they were interesting in theory between their past relationship and the added complications of one being the king’s brother and the other the king’s spymaster—and the secret one of them was hiding.
However, I much preferred them to the thief and her bodyguard, who started mentally drooling over each other about 10 seconds into their first encounter. Instalove is probably my least favorite romantic trope, and I also found the thief’s perspective irritating since it was not very graceful about the fact that she was leaving things out of her narrative. I love this sort of narration when it’s a bit tricky and less conspicuous, but I don’t like it when it draws attention to how mysterious it is that all these details are deliberately being omitted.
Five Broken Blades laid the foundation for a great novel given that it’s basically a heist story with a group of untrustworthy people who are supposed to work together to make it happen, and the characters and their dynamics are intriguing on the surface. However, it didn’t have enough in-depth characterization or worldbuilding for me as a reader, and I had problems with its pacing, narrative style, and lack of subtlety. Although I’d hoped the ending might make the rest worthwhile, it just convinced me I didn’t care to read the sequel when I was not even interested in most of the characters.
My Rating: 5/10 (only because of Sora)
Where I got my reading copy: ARC from a publicist.
