I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I was so eager to love this, and I’m heartbroken that I don’t – and very jealous of every starry-eyed review. That’s what I wanted to feel for Ruiner!

But…I just don’t care. Ruiner falls completely flat for me, emotionally – the writing feels heavy and dull, and trying to read this book just sends me to sleep. I don’t feel the characters, I’m just watching them, being told what they feel, and as characters they’re very two-dimensional, simplistic. I wasn’t engaged, and I didn’t care how the story was going to go, resolve itself, because no one felt real to me.

It doesn’t help that the prose is overwritten, too many awkward adjectives over-describing every person’s gesture, voice, mien, ruining the rhythm of a lot of sentences, the tension of a lot of scenes. When you take a moment to describe how the arms of a chair feel in the middle of a High Stakes conversation, you’ve broken the tension; that kind of thing happens a lot here.

The storytelling-as-combat magic is a ridiculously cool idea, and makes for a fantastic metaphor, but a) I really didn’t understand how it worked, though in fairness maybe I would have if I’d finished the book, and b) …In Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming, there are characters who are storytellers, and when we get one of their stories on-page, they are PHENOMENALLY beautiful. As in, I have all those passages bookmarked to marvel over. Ruiner isn’t like that, and it’s a little difficult to buy into a book treating these stories as Extremely Impressive when…they’re not, really. To me, anyway. It’s similar to how writing stories about art – dance, painting, music, whatever – is really difficult; storytelling about stories runs into the same kind of difficulties, I think, and Ruiner doesn’t overcome them. That makes it very underwhelming, massively undercuts what the book is trying to do.

I am also not really a fan of demonising tech and modernity, which is very much a thing here: cities are BadTM, gadgets handicap you, the only right way to be is a Stone or maybe Bronze Age technology level. It’s a lazy, short-sighted, pretty pointless take: humanity is never going to throw away all our advances, and shouldn’t, because lots of them are good. There are LOTS of things about modern urban life it would be great to change, but Ruiner doesn’t seem to be advocating for change, only for wiping modernity off the map, completely discarding it – not seeming to care about the babies who’d be thrown out with that bathwater. Reading about Kell looking down on her brother depending on a gadget to do what she does naturally made me wonder where disabled people are supposed to exist in her worldview; if we all ‘go back to the land’, where are a lot of us supposed to get the medications we need to survive? I couldn’t physically keep up with Kell’s nomadic people, so would they just abandon me in the desert? People pushing this mentality never consider questions like that. And in Ruiner, cities being evil is taken to nonsensical extremes, like the fact that in Shade’s home it is ILLEGAL to grow vegetables – not to force people to buy from a state monopoly or anything, but because they’re all exported. I can’t believe ANY nation would ever do that, because even the cruellest despots understand that if their populace dies from malnutrition they have no one to rule over any more. Like, come on.

Ruiner has a lot of good things to say about some very important topics, but unfortunately the result comes across as a not very interesting lecture rather than an unputdownable novel. I just couldn’t click with it.

I forced myself to the 50% mark, but I still just don't care.

The main character? A funny, flamboyant sweetheart very honest with himself about who and what he is: I love him. But his first-person narration is very plain, heavy with telling-not-showing. The story moves incredibly slowly. The writing is very easy to read - every time I picked this up, I read three or four chapters seemingly without trying. But I didn't care about any of it, and when I set it down, I didn't want to pick it up again. I mean, Teddy's daughter is kidnapped! And he goes to rescue her, but somehow, there's no urgency to any of it, despite Teddy repeatedly assuring us that he's very worried about her. How do you manage that???

Objectively, I love everything about this premise: Teddy is a 40yo who is Trying His Best, but really doesn't have it together, and I massively approve of getting adult protagonists like that. I love the dragon lore, wherein female dragons are the ones that get enormous and powerful and males stay little and useless. I love Teddy being a very unconventional mess of a dragon-contractor. And I thought it was very interesting how differently people not from Summer viewed dragons and their contractors - there was so much potential for shenanigans there.

But I was desperately bored. Teddy's moments of being hilarious were great - lines line 'Fortunately, I was intimately acquainted with so many other forms of embarrassment that I could rise to the occasion with equanimity' had me cackling - but came pretty rarely after the first few chapters. Despite the stakes being pretty high - a kidnapped little girl - the book completely lacks urgency, doesn't have any sense of forward motion. I liked Teddy, but everyone around him (including Summer the dragon!) was very dull (though the stepson had potential). Summer the island is a non-entity of a place, though in fairness that may be deliberate. Beyond the dragon lore, the world this book is set in seems very generic, with nothing to set it apart. I didn't care about the semi-drama between Teddy and the Admiral he's having an affair with (Teddy's wife is a marriage of convenience, so he's not cheating on her, exactly, but the Admiral is 'happily' married so it's still an affair in that direction) and wasn't interested in whether they'd eventually shape up into a real romance or if they'd break up or what. There's a cult of dragon-worshippers somewhere in the background but they were taking way too long to show up. There's so much telling-not-showing; Teddy can't seem to keep track of what he has or hasn't told 'us', which was just clunky and annoying, especially when he/Radke seemed to be trying to tease us with things to keep us reading, playing coy with random hints and tidbits that were irrelevant to what was happening at that moment (why am I supposed to care about who murdered Leo, someone who was dead long before the start of the book?)

50% through the book, I don't care how the story's going to end. It's just...numbing, and very confusing tonally, and disjointed story-wise. As a whole, it's Nice - as is Teddy in particular - but I need what I'm reading to be more than Vaguely Pleasant. It's not awful, but it's powerfully meh; I feel like I need to take a nap just after writing about it, never mind reading it! Which is truly ridiculous.

I had such high hopes for this one, but it's a massive miss for me.