Review: Ink, Alice Broadway

INK is a YA fantasy story set in the town of Saintstone. It is a town in which everyone is marked with tattoos that display the stories and events of their life. Their belief is if tattoos tell your stories and secrets, your soul will not be burdened and when you die, you can enter the afterlife.

The story's protagonist is a young woman called Leora, on the verge of finishing her schooling career, when she loses her father. After a person in Saintstone dies, their skin is removed and made into a life story book, which then gets judged. If one passes, your stories will be remember forever. If not, your story gets thrown into the fire and you will be 'forgotten' - the worst sentence that can be bestowed.

Leora's ambition is to become an Inker (a tattooist). During her training, however, she begins to find out that things are going wrong in Saintstone. Her father's last words to her were, "Don't forget the blanks", meaning the unmarked, who have been banished. However, the new Mayor wants to be stricter than ever, to root out Blank sympathisers and mark them as forgotten, with a crow.

The writing and plot itself follows the standard YA model, but the setting is different and original enough to keep it interesting. I wasn't a particular fan of Leora - she seemed to be the same unassuming, quiet, self-deprecating, emo type that one sees in a lot of YA fiction - but enough of her surrounding characters were interesting and had enough depth to make me care about what happened to them.

I think there was a lot of potential to this book that didn't get realised. For me, it simply seemed to be following the standard beats and plot points of a story without fleshing them out as fully as it could have been. I didn't get enough of the sense of the history of the place, or why I should care about this war between the Marked and the Blanks. I'm sure that the writer has a lot of this going on in her mind, and maybe that's just the nature of YA writing.

It's a very promising story and I probably will read the sequels, but overall I was left hoping for more than what it was.