Voyage of the Damned

Thanks to @Netgalley and @htpbooks for giving me the eARC for this US release.

When I saw this on Netgalley marketed as a queer murder mystery set on a fantasy cruise ship, I was hooked. This is a political fantasy story with a queer romance woven through it. To mark a thousand years of ‘peace’ the country of Concordia launches a 12 day ocean pilgrimage to a mountain shrine. Aboard are the 12 Blessed, people with a special magical blessing who lead their provinces. But when Blessed suddenly start turning up murdered, Dee Piscero, of the much maligned and totally disrespected Fish clan, makes it his mission to figure shit out.
And Dee was awesome. Dee is hilariously snarky and even though he doesn’t think he’s smart or worthy, he show more actually IS. It’s a great journey through the story as we see him start to step into his own power and confidence. He’s a plus size love interest and his size is only ever shown as a positive. He knows he’s sexy as hell and his body is part of his appeal.
I could not have predicted how this mystery would turn out. Every time I thought I had a clue something would come along and smash my theories. It was delightful. Great dialog and banter and I loved the setting of the story aboard a fantasy cruise ship with tiny dragon stewards!

Read This If You - like a good murder mystery, like queer folks upsetting the status quo, have ever wanted to give the finger to corrupt authorities, have ever given your heart to a sad lost boy inside a cave while sharing your secrets. Or just want to read the story of the boy who did. show less

Not that long ago I read The Tainted Cup and I thought, "Wow, I did not know that murder-mystery-set-in-fantasy-world was the genre I needed". But I figured I'd have to wait for its sequel to get another one. And I could not be happier to be wrong!

Voyage of the Damned is very much a murder mystery that uses the locked room trope. In this case, our entire cast is trapped on a ship together with no way off until they reach their destination. In the nation of Concordia, each of the 12 provinces has one "Blessed", an heir with unique magical abilities. Together they keep the nation safe. They embark on a 12 day pilgrimage aboard a magically powered vessel, and suddenly an heir turns up dead. One by one the heirs are murdered, and it's a show more race to discover the killer, but our hero Ganymedes is hiding a deadly secret - he alone has no Blessing. He's a fraud, with no way to protect himself aside from his wits.

Ganymedes ("Dee") is a perfect protagonist. Funny and self-deprecating without being obnoxious, incredibly relatable, and he forges unlikely friendships. The pacing is fast and action is non-stop, and the plot was delightfully twisty - I really had no idea who dun it, and kept going back and forth on my theories. In terms of representation, this really knocked it out of the park; we have LGBTQ characters and relationships, disabled characters, a mix of gender identities, etc.

It's not perfect. There's a few confusing references that seem out of place for the genre, like talking about hot dogs... Sure, there's no reason a fantasy world couldn't have ALSO invented hot dogs! But it does make you notice and it feels like an anachronism. And we know how the Emperor's Blessing is required to keep the Bandage functioning that protects them from the Crab clan, but... what purpose exactly do the other Blessings serve? They have a tendency to keep them secret, so it doesn't sound like the heirs use them to serve their people, and the Blessing is different for each individual so... what's the point of them, really? Does magic exist in this world in any other form? While this is marketed as adult fiction, it feels like it straddles the line between YA and adult.

The trick is to look at this primarily as a murder mystery in a unique setting with unique characters and constraints, and those nitpicks lose importance. It is absolutely delightful and completely different than anything I've read outside of The Tainted Cup. I strongly recommend this to anyone who enjoys blended genres! show less

Weird and different in the best way! This book was highly creative and SO MUCH fun, while keeping me guessing to the end. At one point, I thought I'd figured out the killer, only to be proven so very wrong. Dee is the kind of character that you feel a deep, personal connection with, almost like he's your real-life best friend. His sincerity and I-don't-give-a-damn attitude make you want someone like him in your life. I can't wait to see what Frances White comes up with next!

I am clearly not the audience for this book. It is about the heirs of each of the provinces of an empire going on a twelve day voyage together for magical and succession purposes, but as the voyage progresses they are being murdered. If I had to describe it in a pithy way, I would say it was a mashup of And Then There Were None with Lord of the Flies with a lot of juvenile romantic angst.

I picked it up because I enjoy a good mystery/SF mashup, and it was the whodunnit aspect that kept me reading, but as I said, I am not the right audience to enjoy this. The main character is immature, unhappy, and very insecure, and starts out to make everyone dislike him in the hope of escaping his duty. All of the characters on the voyage are young show more -- the youngest is 6, the oldest is 30, and the average age seems to be early 20s. The protagonist is also very, very emotional, filled with dread and angst and romantic longing, and I'm just too old to appreciate this sort of emotional journey. The mystery aspect of the story turned out to be ridiculously convoluted, and I found some of the ways the author wrote about social and economic inequity to be heavy-handed and unsubtle. I was also fairly cold to the overarching political conspiracy aspect of the story, and the while I am not a person who would usually claim to care about magic systems in fantasy novels, this one seemed wildly unwieldy and impractical regarding magical abilities being inherited and transferring from one person to another. I do not believe it could have worked for 1,000 years, the way it is designed.

I think this one lives on the border between fantasy and romance, and one of the problems I see with books that tread that line is that the ones written with a romance audience in mind frequently aren't very satisfying to the fantasy audience. And this book is one of those, for me. show less

I adored this book! It was such a fun whodunit set in a fantasy world with powerful characters trapped aboard a ship while a killer is on the loose. The author did a great job with worldbuilding, and I loved our main character, Dee. I wanted the story to keep going so I could see what Dee's life is like after all this.
Shoutout to Nathan Foad for the audio narration. He did copious voices and accents and really brought a lot of personality to our protagonists. I want to read more from Frances White and hear more from Nathan Foad!

If you want to end your summer with all the feels of an Agatha Christie locked house party murder mystery, but you are craving something that is more contemporary then you have a brilliantly plotted choice here. If you are looking for something that has all the challenge and thought provoking cultural critique that comes with a carefully crafted world building that a strong fantasy gives you -- meet Concordia! If you love to watch a hero emerge out of his own shadow dispite the way his peers see him, may I present you with Dee! If you are looking for just enough YA MM romance to make you root for your couple to find their way to each other, if you want side characters who will steal your heart, if you want to feel and worry about show more characters, if you enjoy a book that makes you second guess yourself, and causes you hold your breath while reading....may I present you with THE VOYAGE OF THE DRAGON'S DAWN THAT IS BRINGING THE BLESSED OF CONCORDIA ON PILGRIMAGE, a journey not all will survive but one that will change them all...then may I suggest you gab a copy of 🌟VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED!🌟 show less

My feelings about this book are kinda all over the place. I didn't want to stop reading the book, but I didn't exactly like it. I cared for very few of the characters, but I wanted to know what their secrets were. I liked some parts of the prose and disliked others. I'm glad I read this as a group read-along with discussion questions, though, because that gave me something to focus on other than my annoyance at the main character and meant I never even considered DNFing the book.

THE BAD:
To start with the things I didn't like, I have to start with Dee. I did NOT like him as a character. I started to like him more than at the beginning (where I, along with just about everyone else, hated him) but I never actually liked him. Plus, his show more sense of humor clashed so very hard with what I think is funny. (Except the surprisingly fun puns he sweet-talked Tendai with.) I also got (and didn't like) wannabe Hunger Games vibes from this book between the numbered provinces, the kill-or-be-killed mentality, and the Grasshopper / Rue similarities. I also didn't like the resolution to the mystery, but won't go into why due to spoilers.

Oh, and side note: I don't care that the main character is supposedly 22, this does not read like an adult book. I might class it as New Adult instead of YA, but it really doesn't feel like a book aimed at adults to me. Everyone acts too childish for that (and only the 6-year-old gets a pass on acting childish).

THE SO-SO:
I was interested in how / why each province had a "look" to it, so that you could tell who was from where by looking at them. The realm didn't look that obviously separated in all places (with some exceptions), so I wonder why the people were so drastically different. I also was really interested in the Crabs and what's happening on their side of the border, but since this isn't that story I didn't get any of the answers that I wanted.

THE GOOD:
And let's close with the things I actually liked about this book: some of the side characters were great. I really liked Shinjiro from the start and came to really like Tendai and Newgüi. I liked the worldbuilding concept with the different provinces having their own Blessed and each with their own power. Not enough on the "I liked it" side for me to say I liked the book, but at least I had fun with my overall reading experience. show less