Blood Ties

Blood Ties
Pamela Freeman
Orbit Books

5th June 2008 (UK)
7th April 2008 (US)
400 Pages

Pamela Freeman has made quite a name for herself with her children's and young adult fiction, but this is her first novel for adults, and the first in a series. Blood Ties tells of the stories of Ash, Bramble and Saker, and the people of the Eleven Kingdoms; a place where with the cast of a stone one's future might be told; a place where ghosts are chained to the earth by anger and their quest for revenge; a place where simmering hatreds and rivalries and racisms dating back to the subjugation of an entire people, are about to come out into the light -- or rather, the dark -- and change the world. And Blood Ties is -- pun intended -- bloody good.

That previous writing experience (17 novels!) shows, and Freeman's writing is crisp, sharp and very accessible, with her distinctive "voice" drawing you straight into the novel. From the bit above, it's easy to tell that difficult themes -- namely racism, revenge, rape, death, etc -- are thrown into the mix, but her writing, I think, will still be very enjoyable to people who normally eschew those types of elements within something they read for pleasure.

Saker is probably the least developed of three main Point of View characters. He's currently serving the role of the bad guy what must be stopped -- but he's fairly sympathetic, even if I, naturally, as a reader am rooting for the guys who are going to stop him and his dastardly plan. I was particularly interested in the fact that all three mains PoV characters are Travellers. Within Blood Ties they are heavily prejudiced against -- having been subdued, and mercilessly killed, a thousand years ago, by a warlord called Acton, and his blue-eyed, blonde haired warriors -- but it was interesting to see how all three had different ways of coping with this, and their reactions to the racism. While Pamela isn't preachy -- in fact, I'd have liked to have seen more discussion of the racism inherent in that world -- it showed the severe consequences -- i.e. death -- of an unthinking, cruel, and, above all, pointless, prejudice.

I really liked the little short stories we got within Blood Ties. They were told in first person narrative, and served as a break from the main story, highlighting the life of one particular character. It was a clever way of keeping the number of continuous points of view characters down, and gave a different look at the Castings world, through new eyes. With the short chapters, and these interspersed Stories, it really helps the pace of Blood Ties. Because, while a fair amount does happen, it's not really an action-packed story. At no time does the plot become stuffy, but time is spent on characterisation and slow world-building, in incremental stages, rather than downloading the Entire History of My Fantastic World onto the poor befuddled reader.

There's always a time when it comes to the picking of nits, and there are a few with Blood Ties. While I enjoyed the idea of "local gods", independent to each society -- village, town, etc -- their warnings of danger, and their help -- particularly with Bramble -- could often feel like deus ex machina. There were also certain other flukes, and the meet-up between Ash (and Martine) and Bramble towards the end seemed a little contrived. Other than that, and the cover art which maybe seems a little generic for this type of book, and things are good.

Blood Ties is an excellent book, fun, clever, and well written, with distinctive characterisations, and I will definitely be looking forward to the next book in the series! I'm delighted to have found another good writer.

For more info:

Amazon UK
Amazon US