Bloodtide is based on the Icelandic 'Volsunga Saga', but is set in the future where London has been taken over by ganglords and has been walled off from the rest of the UK, where genetically modified animals, halfmen, roam. A truce is suggested, where the daughter of one clan is given in marriage to the king of another clan and this will set in motion a series of tragic events.
Firstly, it's important to point out that the girl being sold off in marriage is actually fourteen years old, so this book gave me the Ick Factor from the start. I know plenty of fourteen year olds are sexually active, but the dude she marries is in his late twenties, so this is actually rape.
I went into this thinking that I was going to be reading a far future version of Romeo and Juliet - not entirely sure why because there's nothing to suggest this in the blurb of the book -but even if I wasn't pretty horrified about the child bride thing I didn't go into this book with the right thoughts. The plot is basically about betrayal and a really long, long revenge story with magic and gods thrown in too. It's based on an Icelandic story and it really does read like a god-pantheon-hero type story, like Medea or the Odyssey or something. This isn't what I wanted to read, though. It's violent, but the violence didn't shock me like a Stephen King novel. It was an action book, but it didn't excite me.
The story is told from multiple POVs and this made it super confusing, especially as I didn't like any of the characters or find them interesting. They were entirely self-serving and two-dimensional. Then there were a bunch of halfmen, which were these genetically modified animal-human-machine hybrids, which sounds like it should have been awesome, but were just dull-bordering-on-ridiculous.
So, from a positive point of view, the writing is actually really good, I've read a couple of Melvin Burgess's other books and really liked them. He's a great writer. It's really the content, characters and plot of this book I disliked!
There is apparently a sequel to this book. I doubt I'll be reading it.
1.5 stars