THE BLOOD TRIALS

400 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook. Author NE Davenport. Publisher Harper Voyager

- Jonathan Wright

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3.5/5

Mixing fantasy with military SF, Texas-based NE Davenport’s debut initially plays out as a coming-of-age story. It’s one with some particularly tough struggles for the book’s protagonist Ikenna, a young black woman who confronts both racism and misogyny as she undergoes the Praetorian Trials, a brutal series of military initiation tests where getting something wrong can – and for all too many, does – result in death.

Compounding matters, Ikenna is grieving for her recently assassinated grandfather, a top soldier who helped her hide her magical “blood gift” as she grew up. Oh, and war is brewing with the neighbouring Empire of Accacia. The set-up sounds like a YA novel, and this impression initially grows in the reading. As we see the world only from Ikenna’s perspective, someone both wilful and not given to listening, it can become frustrating eavesdropping while she tries to work things out, her efforts often stymied primarily by her own anger.