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MY ⭐️ RATING: 3.5/5
Format: Kindle eBook
BOOK DESCRIPTION
As regional warlords divide Japan, one rogue Samurai will sacrifice everything—apart from his honor—in this thrilling sixth-century epic.
Japan, 1532. In the Age of the Warring States, nothing is as it appears. The young Emperor, Go-Nara, has been reduced to ceremonial irrelevance. After a failed assassination attempt on the royal figurehead, an anonymous samurai is coerced into a suicide mission that will test his skills to the limit. He must face this challenge for the sake of his young charge, a girl who is the last remainder of his duty.
The samurai and the girl must journey to a far and impregnable mountain fortress, fighting off threats and dangers on the way. The girl, knowing no other life, hopes to learn all she can of the ways of the warrior. But they do not travel alone. The hunters are also the hunted.
MY REVIEW
This has been on my TBR backlog for a while because the cover is so stunning. I’ve pushed it back multiple times for no reason other than mood, but after reading Undead Samurai by Baptiste Pinson Wu earlier this year, I knew I had to add more Japanese historical fiction to my repertoire. Then came the massive success of Shogun, which made me decide to fast track it to the top, and I do not regret that decision. Baker does a fantastic job of setting a gritty tone of his story, with a battle among two brothers in the prologue, which sets the events of the story, of a samurai who is on a suicide mission to fulfill his oath. I love that there is a mysteriousness to the samurai because there is never a name revealed, it gave me a similar vibe of V for Vendetta, who was dying and on a suicide mission while hiding his true identity.
Winter Raven is an epic tale of adversity and tenacity with action that was non-stop and many scenes just left me in awe, one in particular was when the samurai was choosing who to take with him on the mission, it was very Squid Games-like, and I never knew who was actually going to be chosen. There were many times during this story that the imagery was pretty gruesome, but felt very realistic and made it more impactful that this time was brutal and unforgiving. One scene really stuck out to me, and it was the worst of them all with a prisoner being “executed,” it had my stomach turning knots. The way this finished kinda has me a bit conflicted, on one hand, it was an incredible finish, but on the other, I did not like the fact that Baker made the decision to not show the final showdown between The Samurai and Motohide. This should’ve been a well drawn out final fight scene, but instead it was “getting ready to fight and then he’s standing over the dead body”… that really killed how good the finale was, up until that point.
“That is the danger of the life we lead. Searching for an ultimate truth. Trying to see to the heart of things. It’s like staring at the sun. It can burn out your eyes. It can drive you insane.”
I loved the characters though, they were all flawed in different ways, The Samurai is magnetic, even when he’s not being a bad dude, I still felt that energy when he was there. The Girl might be my favorite of the bunch, because while the story is about The Samurai and fulfilling his oath, it has a lot more to do with her and her future. The others are prisoners that were recruited to help The Samurai on his mission, very Suicide Squad-like. There is some growth with the characters, but it could’ve used a little more fleshing out, the mysteriousness surrounding The Samurai and The Girl prevented that part, so maybe the growth is fine the way it is.
There is some good prose, but with that said, one thing that I try not to harp on, is editing errors like, misspelled words, a letter left off or an extra letter added… things that would be minor and not really an issue for me, but this had a litany of issues that could’ve been addressed with beta readers, a better editor or an editor in general to have the mistakes taken care of. It’s a really great story with fantastic and flawed characters, but all the editing errors just drove me a bit crazy. I wanted to like this a lot, and even with the writing errors, I was still looking at a solid 4, but then the final showdown was skipped and that just really put the nail in the coffin, and I just couldn’t give it 4 stars after that.
Wolfmantula.com 