Blurb:

Lies woven in blood are lines waiting to be crossed.

Lin is a competent, dedicated soldier but his mission takes a drastic turn when one of his charges is found murdered. Soon after, he is ambushed by magic-twisted monsters, gravely wounded, and abandoned by his one remaining ally.

Waking to find his injuries healed by forbidden magic, Lin is marked as an oathbreaker by the very laws and beliefs he upholds.

Lin soon finds his faith in the faction he’s lived his life upholding tested by the woman who saved him from the brink of death. With his fate hanging by a thread, he faces an impossible choice: stand by his new ally and seek vengeance for his murdered charge or betray her for amnesty from those who’d execute him.

Review:

“A book about weaving threads, and it's grimdark. I’d like to throw myself into that.”, was, paraphrasing here, my general thought process when I heard about ARC copies of “Bloodwoven” being sent out to reviewers. So I asked G.J Terral for a copy, and within a week (and an American holiday later), I jumped into his new novel expecting the usual plotline a novel like this would have:
Set-up →Thickening of Plot → Twist → Final, grim, and bloody conflict.

And after reading “Bloodwoven”, that plotline I thought this novel would follow got tossed out of the nearest available window. 

If I had to convince a family member to read this book, I’d give them these two sentences: “Laws that cannot be broken, lest one wants to damn themselves. That’s what Lin thinks, until a surprise attack changes everything.”, with my customary “Care to know more?” tacked onto it. But once again it fails to capture the full scale of chaos and chess that take place within “Bloodwoven”.

First, we have the cast of G.J. Terrals tale. More specifically, Lin and the child. The others are just as interesting, including a duplicitous psychopath, but since they aren’t in the blurb, they ain’t being mentioned. So, we have Lin.

Lin is your typical hired guard - with a caveat. He can wield Threads, and his only guard duties are those cut from the same cloth. Besides that, he has absolute faith in the Weavers, the gods of his religion, and doesn’t dare cross their laws, for fear of death or worse. I loved the progression he had through the book, with his struggles, his triumphs, his discoveries and eventually, the promise of more to come. 

After Lin, we have the child. The Child. Born and immediately semi-orphaned afterwards, the child gets dragged around the world, experiencing a lot as a newborn. Throughout it all, they survive, and again, there’s a promise of more chaos.

After the characters, we have the plot of “Bloodwoven”. Within the first few minutes of reading this book, I thought I knew where it was going, and by the end of it, most of what I predicted would happen did not. Going back to what I said at the beginning, it doesn’t follow the path I thought it would take. On one hand, it reminds me of the sweeping epic of LoTR, and on the other hand, it’s akin to a D&D game that went off the rails as soon as the Game Master asked for the players to roll the first dice. Half the time I was surprised at where the story went, the other half was spent arranging puzzle pieces on a board. Not a moment felt out of touch with the next, and time passed rather quickly while reading.

Then, there’s the magic system within “Bloodwoven”, with the threads. In his short story collection, Terral had briefly touched this system, but here? Here it gets fleshed out in the extreme. Not only is it original in what it does, but it also doesn’t feel forced. And it’s almost all sewing related. At least according to Lin. There’s others. With more knowledge, and even then, this tale only scratches the full surface of what is being offered. Weaves, threads, the weavers, tethered, untethered… the list goes on and on and on. Long story short about this magic system. Tethered are the people who don’t bother (or held back by law from) stitching their skin with weaves. Untethered are the ones who do it for various reasons. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Results of the stitchings vary, and it’s never done capriciously, and even if it is, the person doing so is a fool. Besides that, the threads and weaves can be used for various defensive or offensive spells, with certain items being used to focus it, like a sword hilt with a needle shaped hole in it. And it can be nullified by at least two materials. Other weaves, or a very specific stone type.

Finally, we get to some of the moral quandaries of this book. As I’ve said before, this reminded me of a D&D game, and some scenes felt like they were tossed in to see how characters in the book would react to that. And the fact that half of those situations were internal debates about doing things of dubious nature going against both old friendships and internalised beliefs? Wonderfully done, and I can’t wait to see the other struggles tossed towards Lin and the other surviving characters in the second book of this trilogy!

If I had to gripe about something in “Bloodwoven”, I’d say that some characters were kept way past their run time for later usage. On one hand, yes, I’m glad they stayed around. On the other hand, I wanted to use them as a human bowling pin. I know that was the intention behind them, but even still, more subtlety next time, please!

Overall, if you want a magic system that is practically brimming with enough lore to fill a few libraries, and a magic system that causes people to question their sanity, “Bloodwoven” is for you.

As always, if you’ve made it to this part of the review, thank you for reading it, and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. And if you wish to see what other reviewers on this team have said about “Bloodwoven”, they are linked here in no particular order:
- Review: Bloodwoven by G.J. Terral — SFF Insiders, Dave Lawson

- Review: Bloodwoven by G.J. Terral — SFF Insiders, Indyman

- Review: Bloodwoven by G.J. Terral — SFF Insiders, Bluesmoke Bob

If this book however does not fit your cup of tea, don’t fret, we here have an extensive catalogue of reviews for novels either in the same vein as “Bloodwoven”, like Luke Schulz’s review of “The Blackest Heart”, or lay completely elsewhere, like E.L Lyons review of “Slab City Blues”. 

Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!