Book Revirew: Ink by Amanda Sun

JAPAN! DRAWINGS THAT COME TO LIFE! YES! WANT!

Ink is in their blood

On the heels of a family tragedy, Katie Greene must move halfway across the world. Stuck with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, Katie feels lost. Alone. She doesn’t know the language, she can barely hold a pair of chopsticks, and she can’t seem to get the hang of taking her shoes off whenever she enters a building.

When Katie meets aloof but gorgeous Tomohiro, the star of the school’s kendo team, she is intrigued by him... and a little scared. His tough attitude seems meant to keep her at a distance, and when they’re near each other, strange things happen. Pens explode. Ink drips from nowhere. And unless Katie is seeing things, drawings
come to life.

Somehow Tomo is connected to the kami, powerful ancient beings who once ruled Japan—and as feelings develop between Katie and Tomo, things begin to spiral out of control. The wrong people are starting to ask questions, and if they discover the truth, no one will be safe.

I heard about this book last year so I was rather excited to see it on Netgalley/it coming out (Came out 5th July UK). I think I might have hype this book too much to myself as I just loved the idea of it. I have a soft spot for Japan and as I love art/illustration I love supernatural/powers involving drawings. It's a good book but its wasn't as good as I was hoping. I think I just wanted Amazing, but it wasn't that level of awesome.

This book contains drawings in appropriate places that correspond to the story. The also lovely art on the chapter's head and these tiny drawings in the corners of the page. So I got this off Netgallery (as I kinda said above), but I'm planning to eventually get my own copy of this book and this one of the reason. Also this is a start of a series and I definitely want to read the next book.

The characters were all very likable, though the main character Katie does a bit of a stalker issue. I really liked Katie best friends Yuki and Tanaka. I like Tomohiro as character/person, but not sure what I think of romantic interest. Though, romance doesn't really do much for me to begin with. Katie herself quite a strong character, she been through a lot of with the sudden death of her mother and the whole moving to a very foreign country. Also her aunt is very sweet.

Japanese is sprinkle through out the book which I like quite like. Though that might only because I briefly attempted to learn Japanese to watch Anime without subtitles and know what some Japanese words mean before reading 'Ink'. Also it plays into the whole Katie being from another country and natively speaks another language. Its kinda weird since it's English speaking book but the characters are actually speaking Japanese for majority of the book. I think that sentence made sense.

So I gave this book 4/5 stars and I plan to continue the series. You can currently find the prequel novella 'Shadow' (and the first chapter of Ink) to read on Wattpad. I actually sort of like the prequel more as you got Tomohiro point of view too and I gave it 5/5 stars.

I also made a video review for this book on my booktube channel where you can hearing me talking about it and attempting to speak Japanese.