Audiobook Review – Bloody Rose (The Band, Book 2) by Nicholas Eames, Narrated by Katherine Fenton (3.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 18 hours and 2 minutes
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Release Date: August 28, 2018
ASIN: B07FB6251P
Stand Alone or Series: 2nd book in The Band series
Source: Bought on Audiobook from Audible
Rating: 3.5/5 stars

“Tam Hashford is tired of working at her local pub, slinging drinks for world-famous mercenaries and listening to the bards sing of adventure and glory in the world beyond her sleepy hometown.
When the biggest mercenary band of all rolls into town, led by the infamous Bloody Rose, Tam jumps at the chance to sign on as their bard. It’s adventure she wants – and adventure she gets as the crew embark on a quest that will end in one of two ways: glory or death.”

Series Info/Source: This is the second book in The Band series. I bought this for audiobook from Audible .

Thoughts: I liked this but not as much as the first book in The Band series. This book just felt a bit slow and boring to me. I also expected that we were going to be hearing from Rose in this book. However, instead, we are hearing from Fable’s young bard, Tam. The story is more about Tam and Rose’s band, Fable, than Rose herself. The tone to this book is fairly sad and depressing. I think the ending tries to be uplifting, but it still seemed very sad to me.

Tam is sick of working at the local pub and hearing about all the wonderful adventuring stories from the mercs that drink there. When one of the most famous mercenary bands, Fable, rolls in, Tam gets a chance to audition as their Bard. Bloody Rose herself ends up approving of Tam’s playing and and suddenly Tam is off on amazing adventures. Even though another horde is threatening the realm, Fable has accepted an impossible job to find and take out a mythical creature.

This book again was more about the band Fable itself than any adventure or battle. Yes, we do end up on an adventure, and there are a couple large battles in here. However, this is more about the members of Fable. We get sidetracked on a quest to help out Fable’s druid at one point. Then find out that the battle to fight a mythical creature is just another side quest. Then we get sidetracked at Freecloud’s father’s home. You get the idea. We wandered a lot in this book and at times it felt unnecessary.

The book is also about Tam and her longing for adventure and then getting that longing fulfilled. She is young when she leaves town and grows a lot throughout the story. I never really engaged with her well as a character; she just didn’t have a lot of depth. We do get to see Bloody Rose and Freecloud and their day to day lives. Their presence is definitely a part of the story, however we constantly see through Tam’s (or other characters’) eyes. We are basically left with the sense that all of these mercs are damaged, yet strong people who have made their own family with their Band.

I struggled with the ending of this. The final battle seems abrupt, and the way it ended was confusing to me. Then there was the epilogue, which was even more confusing. Ends up in the book they switch text types in the epilogue but I listed to this on audiobook which didn’t have a change in the epilogue. Once I listened to the ending a couple of times (and then went on reddit to verify what I thought happened) I didn’t really appreciate the message about Rose and her choices.

In the end, I appreciated the strong female characters throughout. However, I thought the book wandered too much and was a bit confusing. I definitely didn’t love this like the first book in this series.

As mentioned above, I listened to this on audiobook and the narration was well done. I liked the narration on Kings of the Wyld a bit better, but understand the narrator change since the main POV was female for this book.

My Summary (3.5/5): Overall this was okay. It was fun to revisit this world and to learn more about Fable as a band. I wasn’t a huge fan of the main character and was disappointed that we never really got to hear from Rose’s POV. This is almost like multiple books squished together, and I thought the story wandered too much. The wandering made this feel long and boring at times. I also found the end confusing and hard to follow. Despite not liking this book as much as the first book, I will keep my eye out for future books by Eames. It looks like a 3rd book is planned for The Band called Outlaw Empire, but there haven’t been any updates on it for awhile. It also looks like Eames might be focusing more on graphic novels now.