Kirkus Book Reviews, home of famously cranky and hard-to-please reviewers, unbent so far as to give The Assassin’s Curse a starred review. With praise and blurbing from the likes of Tamora Pierce and Adrian Tchaikovsky, I doubt my sour opinion will lose Clarke’s publishers much sleep. But the fact remains: I can’t join in the paeans of praise.
I guess this makes me even crankier than Kirkus, because when it comes to The Assassin’s Curse, I find myself distinctly under-impressed. Which is at least a little odd, because on the face of it, Clarke’s debut novel has a number of elements that, going on past experience, should have hit my bulletproof kink buttons. Pirates! Assassins! Enemies thrown together by circumstance and forced to work together!
[...This should work better than it does.]