Six months ago, the men of the lakelands marched south to fight a dark god.
Weeks after the final battle was won, sixteen-year-old Hallie and her sister, Marthe, are still struggling to maintain their family farm—and are waiting for Marthe’s missing husband to return. After a summer of bitter arguments, Hallie is determined to get Roadstead Farm through the winter—and keep what’s left of her family together, despite an inheritance destined to drive them apart.
But when Hallie hires a wandering veteran in a bid to save the farm, every phantom the men marched south to fight arrives at her front gate. Spider-eyed birds circle the fields, ghostly messages write themselves on the riverbank, and soon Hallie finds herself keeping her new hired hand’s desperate secrets—and taking dangerous risks. But as she fights to keep both the farm and her new friend safe, ugly truths about her own family are emerging—truths that, amid gods, monsters, and armies, might tear Roadstead Farm apart.
I read a couple of not as good as expected books in the fall before I started on my assignments and essays for school. This was one of them.
I bought this book in August-ish, hoping for a good book about the apocalypse war, the aftermath, and how the war would come back. Those things kind of happened, but not as I expected. It has a good premise, and a good writing style. It just has too many moments where things fall short or fall flat on their face, making it a difficult book to plough through.
My biggest problem is that there are far too many conflicts: there's the sisterly conflict, the bigger family history conflict, the conflict with the farm hand, with the town, with the neighbours, the mayor. It seems like everyone has a conflict with Hallie, our main character and narrator. It has some good moments, but there are just too many conflicts, which bogs down the book and makes it be unfocused. While some of the conflicts are necessary for the plot and the overall narrative and tone of the book, some could have easily been removed and made the book be way more focused than it was.
I found that Hallie was more well-developed than the sister, Marthe. But besides Hallie and the farm hand Heron (whose real identity I knew right away when he was introduced), none of the characters were all that well developed. It was frustrating at times. Marthe was a horribly portrayed person and I did not feel sympathy towards her. She was an awful human being and then she just turned around and did an unjustified 180 towards the end of the book when the plot called for it, which led to more frustration because that conflict is one of the more necessary ones. The love interest sort of came out of nowhere and all of a sudden we're meant to care about their burgeoning relationship.
While Leah Bobet has an excellent writing style, it's diminished by the inundation of plot threads, slow pacing, and too many conflicts going on in the novel. It was really her writing style, and the creepy, not-quite-right atmosphere that kept me going throughout this book. I had so many questions while reading this book that did not get answered or were glossed over by other things, even the important one, like how did the war start? who was the god? Things like that detracted greatly from the overall enjoyment of the novel.
An Inheritance of Ashes is ultimately a pretty forgettable novel. It took me longer to read it than usual because a) I was in the middle of assignments and b) it was so slowly paced and I didn't really care that much about what happened. There is way too much going on in this book that it did not have a focus. The characters were not really that well-developed and it really took all I had to not DNF this book. That being said, the writing style of Leah Bobet, and her creation of tone and atmosphere was very well-done, and was probably the best part of the book. It had a lot of potential to be a great novel, which disappoints me. I'm going to give An Inheritance of Ashes a 2/5.
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