Charlotte Kersten

“You have to decide what matters most. Your humanity or your survival.”

Year published: 2022

Category: Epic fantasy (YA)

Summary: Fifteen-year-old Sloane can incinerate an enemy at will—she is a Scion, a descendant of the ancient Orisha gods.

Under the Lucis’ brutal rule, her identity means her death if her powers are discovered. But when she is forcibly conscripted into the Lucis army on her fifteenth birthday, Sloane sees a new opportunity: to overcome the bloody challenges of Lucis training, and destroy them from within.
Sloane rises through the ranks and gains strength but, in doing so, risks something greater: losing herself entirely, and becoming the very monster that she abhors.

What I Thought

There are unfortunately a lot of things that did not work for me about this book – plot holes, lack of subtlety, and unnecessary romance among them. That being said, it is a very exciting read with lots of action and plot twists. I’ll do my best to cover all of this in my review.

To start, there are a variety of plot holes and plot decisions that just do not make sense. A lot of these have to do with the Lucis base and how it is run. For instance, I’m not entirely clear about the child soldiers’ training. If their purpose is just to be cannon fodder in the desert, wouldn’t the Lucis want to keep as many of them alive as possible instead of killing massive numbers of them before they are deployed? A lot of other things don’t make sense – Sloane is able to murder a guard in this incredibly secure, hypervigilant military base and it is never mentioned again, for instance. She is also able to steal a uniform from her commander Dane to sneak around in disguise, and later she and her allies break into the Archives by carefully plotting out/accounting for everything except, inexplicably, how to take care of the security cameras in the Archives. Both of these end up working out fine because the people involved have secret allegiances that make them help Sloane, but what bothers me is that she has no way of knowing about these secret allegiances and acts without knowing how the situations will be resolved.

Sloane is driven throughout the book to find out her mother’s fate, not only to resolve her lingering questions but also with the goal of restoring her grandfather and best friends’ reputation back home. I am not quite sure how she thinks this will work out because she has no way of communicating with them while at the Lucis base and her grandfather insists that once she reaches the desert, she must start a new life with the rebels and never look back.

I also mentioned an overall lack of subtlety, and what I mainly mean by this is that Sloane’s character doesn’t really develop over the course of the story and there is no real psychological depth or realism to the way she reacts to the atrocities she is forced to commit or the nature of the world around her. She states at one point that she used to think that she was a monster and experience shame for being a Scion, but all of that internalized shame and doubt is entirely gone by the time the book starts. I think the story could have been a lot more powerful if it had included some element of that journey as opposed to having Sloane be at that conclusion of total self-righteousness and imperviousness to propaganda already. I can’t help but feel that Blood Scion has the potential to explore a lot of really rich questions about colonialism and resistance and, as the blurb states, potentially becoming “the monster that [you] abhor” by committing atrocities in the name of survival or rebellion. I just don’t necessarily know that it dug deep enough for my personal tastes.

I also found the romance with Dane completely unnecessary. There was nothing about the characters or their relationship that made for a compelling romance, and I don’t think this is the kind of story that is at all augmented by a love subplot. When you add to that the age difference and massive power dynamic between a child soldier and her commander…it might be one of my least favorite examples of superfluous YA romance yet.

As I mentioned at the start, Blood Scion is a gripping, action-packed read, and, despite the flaws that I noticed while I read, I still read the book very quickly and was absorbed during my reading experience. I think other readers might not be bothered by the things that I pointed out and appreciate a decisive heroine who is filled with so much anger at the unjust state of her world.