Review: A FATE INKED IN BLOOD by Danielle Jensen

Publisher: Del Rey
Page Count: 432
Release Date: February 27th, 2024
Series: SAGA OF THE UNFATED, Book 1
Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

For years, Freya has had a secret: she is an unfated, one of the rare people blessed with a drop of god blood that gives her a divine gift. Warned by her late father to hide her ability, Freya is finally forced to reveal herself to protect her family. It’s then she learns that there is a prophecy that claims whoever controls the fate of the woman with her ability shall unite all of Skaland and rule as their king. Soon Freya finds herself bound by a blood oath to the service of a power-hungry jarl, who is determined to be the king of the prophecy. In order to survive, Freya is going to need to become a warrior and fast, for there are those who would rather see her dead than bow to a king. But Freya’s got another complication: her growing attraction to the jarl’s son Bjorn, another unfated who is determined to carve his own destiny.

A FATE INKED IN BLOOD is an adventure-filled Viking fantasy romance that gets hamstrung in the third act by keeping its reveals until way too late. The first two-thirds of the book is a great adventure. Jarl Snorri is determined to use Freya as a symbol to rally around, proof that he is destined to lead. The other jarls in the area aren’t eager to fall in line, however, and so it becomes a race to build up Freya’s reputation before another jarl can kidnap her or kill her. It leads to a lot of daring trials, brutal battles, and harrowing moments as Freya tries to survive and to learn how to wield the magical and political power she is developing. It also leads to introspection about what kind of leader Freya wants to be. Does it matter if her own people fear her, as long as they are safe?

Alongside this adventure is a swoon-worthy slow burn romance between Bjorn, the jarl’s son, and Freya. What starts as flirtation builds to something more, made more complicated by the fact that, publicly, Freya is second wife to Jarl Snorri (Slight spoiler: they agree not to consummate the marriage as Snorri is very much still in love with his current first wife.) Bjorn is a great love interest who treats Freya as an equal, including being willing to butt heads with her when he disagrees. Of the romance part of this book, I have no notes.

I do, however, have a few issues that prevented me from falling in love with this book as much as I could have. The first is Freya herself, as I felt like she didn’t have enough growth to satisfy me. She rarely interrogates anything beyond surface level. As a person with a god gift, she is supposed to be “unfated” yet because of the prophecy that says someone will control her fate, she is all too willing to bend to blame things as being out of her control because the prophecy says someone will control her. At the same time, she takes on guilt for other people’s actions to a somewhat absurd degree, constantly insisting things are her fault. While this is technically a duology and there’s another book for her to evolve, I wanted her to become a more self-reliant person than this book let her be.

But the most egregious error this book makes is keeping its characters in the dark about secrets for way too long. There was a twist that became fairly evident to me early in the book that I was convinced that the characters had figured out, only to find out a hundred pages later that no one had made the same leap of logic – and they didn’t until the very end of the book. The clues were there in such a way that I didn’t feel like I had been a clever reader to have figured it out, it felt like the characters were blatantly ignoring evidence or refusing to ask decent questions. The result is that I spent the final third of the book increasingly frustrated with characters who were simply baffled by “mysterious” happenings, when there was an obvious explanation for events.

Still, I cannot deny that overall I had a really enjoyable time with A FATE INKED IN BLOOD. I was definitely picking it up at every opportunity, and enjoyed the Viking setting. Now that the not-so-secret secrets are out, I’ll be eager to see where things go in the second book of this duology.

Note: I was provided a free ARC by the publisher in exchange for my fair and honest review.