Hi everyone! Today is my date for the TARŌ book tour! I’m sorry that this is being posted so late; I’ve had a very busy week, so I honestly just started writing this a couple of hours ago. There will probably be some errors and typos that I’ll need to come back to and edit out later, but I obviously needed to get this up today, so.
Now, before I get into my review, I’d first like to give a huge thank you to Love Book Tours and to the author, Blue Spruell, for including me in the TARŌ book tour and providing me with a physical copy of the book for review. If you’d like to learn more about Spruell and his work, I included his links at the end of this post.
Now, onto the review!
Review
By now, I think you all know that I’m a fanatic for history; but I have a special love for legends and myths and the like. So, obviously, when I realized that this book was based on Japanese history and Japanese legends?! Yeah, you can bet that I was extremely happy.
And, to be entirely truthful, Spruell did an excellent job weaving everything together into a single story. There were a lot of threads of inspiration that went into the book, but everything came together so nicely. Plus, I loved how he explained where he drew information from at the beginning of the book; it definitely helped to understand the connections and where certain elements in the story came from.
But aside from doing an amazing job at combining all these different tales and historical facts together, Spruell just has an amazing writing style. He really brought the story to life with wonderful, realistic writing. I wouldn’t say it’s lyrical or beautiful in the way that some books are, but I loved it. It had a certain balance between realistic and fantastical tones, I guess, that really made the story into something special.
Now, I should probably get into some specifics about the plot and the characters.
The plot had plenty of excitement, but also a lot of emotion. The action starts almost immediately, and from there it’s a tale of revenge and magic and war. And I think that the action scenes are where Spruell’s writing really shines; as I mentioned before, his writing made everything seem incredibly realistic.
As for the characters in this story, I definitely enjoyed reading about them. Obviously, the main character, the titular Tarō, is the star of the show. He was very well-written, and I liked his personality; he’s more interested in books than in fighting, but he steps up when he needs to. But I also loved the other characters in the story, too. (Most importantly, though, Kamehime is iconic, and she really added something special to the book. I promise you’ll love her if you read this.)
So, all things considered, I definitely recommend reading TARŌ! It has a lot going for it, between excellent writing, an action-packed plot, and wonderful characters. But I especially recommend it if you enjoy historical fantasy fiction because in that case, this is definitely the perfect book for you.
Author Info
Buy on Amazon
Add on Goodreads
Pst! If you enjoyed this post for the TARŌ book tour, you can use the Book Tours tab above (under Extras!) to find more of the tours I’ve participated in.
