eProof Review - Ink Blood Sister Scribe

One of my bookish resolution of 2024 is to try and get my eProof backlog under control. I do have a lot of books and audiobooks gifted to me very kindly by publishers and authors, and I would like to try and tackle this backlog.

One of the titles that have been on my backlog radar is Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs, It’s one of those titles that tickled my fancy for quite a while, but, for one reason or another, I’ve kept putting it off. But, with everything that has happened to my reading over the past few months, I decided to audiobook this from my local library and hope I will fly through it.

Title and Author: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

Publisher: Penguin

Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: eProof gifted by UK publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review/reaction & library audiobook.

Buy from (Affiliate): uk.bookshop.org

In this fantasy thriller debut, we follow estranged sisters Joanna and Esther. Joanna lives alone in Vermont, the sole protector of a collection of rare magical books. One of these books killed their father.

Esther moves every few months. Different country, different jobs, staying no longer than a year, desperate to avoid the magic that her father and stepmother warned her about. But she’s found love on a research base in Antarctica and she wants to stay… then she discovers blood on the mirrors and she knows someone on the base is using blood magic and they are coming after her and her sister’s collection.

Esther and Joanna are in danger. But from who and where? And how is this connected to a young man in London who's uncle won’t let him out of his sight?

I am going to be honest. I probably shouldn’t read/audiobook this while I am in the reading funk, but if I didn’t audiobook this or one of my many audiobook TBR (both bought and gifted), I would be going down a podcast rabbit-hole and I fear for my partner’s mental health if he comes home from work and all I listened to was true crime podcasts…

But I went into this audiobook (narrated by Saskia Maarleveld) not knowing much about it or reading other people’s reaction. I am going to admit that, while I do like Saskia Maarleveld’s reading, I did fasten my listening to 1.25 speed as she does take long pauses and, after a while, it did begin to grate on me.

Now, the book. I am going to split this into two. The first half (between 25% to 50%) is slow in pacing for my taste. Now, I completely get why now that I have finished the book: it was giving us chance to sink into this dark magic world that is grounded in ours and allowed our characters time to breathe and us to get to know them. But you know me, I like my thrillers to hit that ground running.

However, once the world and characters are set up, the pacing picks up and it becomes unputdownable and became a fantasy thriller that gave me A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness vibes. It was dark and grown-up read.

Barring the slow start, this is a strong, solid debut and I can’t wait to see what this author is going to write next. I am a little annoyed that it’s taken this long to get round to this!