Title: Kindreds: An Alliance of Bloods
Author: Tani Mura
Genre: novel
Price: $2.99 (ebook)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
ASN: B00EK5IMOC
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib
When I started reading Kindreds, I found myself following a mental checklist. Plucky female heroine with convenient and
atypical combat skills? Check. Dystopian future America ruled by crazed
dictator? Check. One big capital city where everybody likes
Latin names? Check. The checklist was that of “Hunger Games fanfic” and Tani Mura hit
all the marks. Now, she doesn’t have a
gladiatorial game, and her society is organized along lines of strict racial segregation,
so Suzanne Collins isn’t going to be suing for copyright infringement, but Kindreds is clearly influenced and
patterned after Hunger Games.
Having said that, I rather enjoyed the Hunger Games, so I was hopeful for Kindreds. But I find myself ambivalent at best over Ms.
Mura’s story. One of the many tropes of
fantasy is “The Chosen One” – some person born to save us all. Here, Ms. Mura’s lead character Raine is that
chosen one, although per the standard script, Raine doesn’t realize she’s
chosen until much later.
And Kindreds
is really fantasy, not science fiction.
The technology is more technobabble, and geology seems to have been
ignored in the creation of the world. I
found many of the secondary characters cardboard cutouts, and some of the action
sequences not very plausible. Per Mura’s
blog, she’s writing as a hobby. There’s
nothing wrong with that (I’m certainly not making a living writing) but this
piece of hobby-writing didn’t strike me as worth the effort. The only reason I’m rating it as a six out of
ten is that the presentation and editing is well-done, and if you’re looking for
more in the Hunger Games world this
may fit your bill.
6/10
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