Mark of the Raven
Something I don’t do very often on The Rebel Christian is review books released by bigger name publishers, but I really want to introduce more Christian books to readers and I’d heard a lot about this so I thought I would read it and give it a feature. I wish I had listened to my gut and not spent that 10.99….
But since books cost money and money isn’t free, I grinded my way through as much as I could and here I am, ready to put together some sort of review to make myself feel like this wasn’t a complete and total waste of my time and money.
Here we go…
First off, I hate posting negative reviews so I am not going to flame this book, but I will be honest and point out what I liked and disliked.
I loved the name and the concept of the book. I immediately thought it was going to be something dark and mysterious and filled with power and magic and conflict. The cover was not very appealing, but I had already dedicated myself to the book no matter what it looked like on the outside. So I downloaded a sample and threw myself into the Ravenwood universe.
Mark of the Raven is about a teenager named Selene who is born with a mark (yes, of the Raven) on her back. This is obviously indicative of how potent her powers will be as a dreamkiller once her gift awakens; we learn more about it as the story goes on.
When Selene gains her gift her training as a dreamkiller begins immediately. She is taken under her mother’s wing and learns how to enter dreams and manipulate them using her powers. It is her job to find a person’s fears and use that against the dreamer—either to gain knowledge about them or sometimes to kill them. And this is where I started to dislike both the story and the main character.
Selene constantly reminds us how she trained her entire life to become a dreamkiller, yet she is TOTALLY shocked to find out what exactly a dreamkiller does. I can sympathize that maybe Selene didn’t expect to become an assassin and have to kill people, but I just don’t understand what on earth she thought she would be doing in a job titled dreamKILLER. As if all the training with her twin blades wasn’t a big enough hint that some bit of violence would be involved.
EVEN SO…. Once Selene learned she had to kill people, it wasn’t something she jumped into right away. She literally spent the first part of the book just … scaring people. In. Their. Dreams.
Basically, she created nightmares. And this somehow brought bile up her throat, tears to her eyes, and summoned a terrible case of the shakes at just the thought of doing it. I get it, it made her uncomfortable, it wasn’t in her nature to perform these acts—especially not against people she grew up around. But I found it very difficult to relate to her woes and discomfort because of the total lack of characterization and development.
We didn’t meet many of the servants she loved so much until she was inside their dreams. So it was hard for me to care about them being scared of something that couldn’t even hurt them in the first place. And this brings me to my next point.
The writing was very elementary. To the point where I suspect this is the author’s very first book, or she is a very young author.
Busse constantly repeated herself and used the same imagery over and over again. I got so tired of seeing “bile rising in my throat” I started to worry for this girl’s esophagus. Besides that, there was just no development. Anywhere. No world-building, no relationships, and barely any story-telling because 80% of the book is just Selene whining about everything. There was A LOT of inner dialogue that made me start skipping paragraphs throughout the book.
Despite this review, I will recommend this to readers of all ages. It is a very clean book and has an interesting premise. I did enjoy and appreciate the Christian concepts introduced in the book, with the notion of choosing to use your gift for Light or for Darkness. So I think it is something young Christian readers will appreciate, especially if you are new to the genre, but secular readers will definitely enjoy it as well.