Paper & Blood is the second book in the UF Ink & Sigil series by Kevin Hearne. Released 10th Aug 2021 by Penguin Random House on their Del Rey imprint, it's 304 pages and is available in hardcover, paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is a really fun series with an ensemble cast and an intricate and well built world (the same settings and tangential political/magic governmental bodies as his Iron Druid chronicles). I enjoyed the iron druid books, and love Atticus and his canine cohorts. They make an appearance in this installment of the series as well, along with Al's other compatriots, Buck Foi (a drunken cursed hobgoblin), Nadia (pit fighter and office manager extraordinaire), and their tricked out Scooby-Doo-esque wizard van.
This time, they're road-tripping to Australia and everything really -does- want to kill them. Many of the characters in this book are Scottish and the author has made a herculean attempt to translate the language and accent. It's mostly successful and I didn't have any trouble following (and got more than one chuckle out of the vernacular), but readers unfamiliar with spoken Scottish might find parts of the book slow going. The language is rough, but not egregiously so. There is violence and destruction aplenty (again, used in context). For readers familiar with the author's other work, it's on a similar level (or roughly equivalent) to Jim Butcher, Charles Stross, and the like. I couldn't help but hear the dialogue in my head in the Glaswegian accent as written.
I loved the vernacular. Readers who hate transliterated accented dialogue will probably be somewhat annoyed, but it's worth the effort. Some of the dialogue surprised an actual guffaw out of me, and that's a pretty big deal. I found it genuinely funny and I really am looking forward to more in this world setting.
Four and a half stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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