Review: Ink

Ink by Amanda Sun

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, this is a Twilight-ish book, meaning girl moves to new place and meets a dangerous boy who warns her to stay away, but she can't, they fall in love and it turns out something about her will bring out the most dangerous parts of him. This formula is apparently what female young adult authors write, when the boys are doing the "my male protagonist was in love with his childhood best friend and now that she's back in his life will they fall in love?"-plot. I'm not hating on this or anything, it's a classic plot and once boy and girl have gotten to know each other cool stuff can happen. The Firelight series I read earlier this year was the same, but the girl was a dragon and the boy was a dragon hunter, and after the first book that was really just Twilight, the series got much more interesting.

Which I guess means I must read the sequel to this as well?

In Ink the girl is an American who has been forced to relocate to Japan after her mother's death, and the boy is the descendant of the old Japanese gods whose drawings will literally come to life because of his magic powers. Yeah, that part is actually as awesome as it sounds. Their relationship and meet-cute... not so great. Katie just makes a lot of weird decisions after her brief first encounter with Tomohiro, things that I felt just happened so that they'd start hanging out. And I get that he's trying to push people away, but his portrayal in the earlier parts of the book had me very confused about what was going on: I honestly thought he was supposed to be possessed or something.

Katie in general isn't portrayed all too consistently either. At first we're told she can barely buy grocieries while speaking Japanese, but still most of her conversations through-out the book is in that language. Maybe time passes between the first mention of her not speaking Japanese well and the rest of the book, but I didn't get that impression at all and it came off as weird. Other than that I like Katie, she doesn't hate on herself too much, and while she and Tomo gets a bit too over-dramatical at times, mostly I can at least understand why she is feeling the way she does. Moving to a strange country when your mother dies is never not going to be upsetting. I also liked that she kept up with her friends, even when all the weird stuff started to happen. I thought it was a bit sad thought that we never got to know anything about her life prior to arriving to Japan: did she have friends in the US? A boyfriend? Anything?

Something else I didn't like was that the author fucking hates the word "said". I swear to the gods (maybe not the Kami gods ...), it is used ONCE in the entire book. I mean wtf!? So many "explained", "commented" and "whispered" just jfc, who thought that was a good idea? Said is a GREAT word, use it as much as you can. It just gets ridiculous when you refuse to do it, and some lines didn't read well at all after a word like "expained" or "whined" or whatever. Ugh, no.

Now I'm hating, but whatever. The best part of this book is without a doubt the magic and the world-building. I LOVED the drawings coming to life, I loved the ink, I loved the magic, it was so creative and awesome. Almost every scene with moving drawings or ink magic is described so beautifully and paints (hehe) these amazing images for you. Very awesome, and that alone is enough to make me want to read the sequels. Now that the initial Twilight-story is out of the way, we can really get into this world and this story, and I'm somewhat excited for that.

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True story.