Publisher Description
Picture a world where every significant moment is tattooed on your skin for ever. When Leora's father dies, she knows he deserves to have all his tattoos removed and made into a Skin Book to record his good life. But when she discovers that his ink has been edited and his book is incomplete, she wonders whether knew him at all.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We were thrilled to throw ourselves into author Alice Broadway’s world—one where every human receives a tattoo for each of life’s momentous occasions. In this world, nothing you do—good or bad—goes unnoticed. We meet Broadway’s intoxicating lead, Leora, just as her father dies and she’s tasked with completing his "skin book”. Her father’s story uncovers a mysterious life Leora realises she knows almost nothing about. Ink is the first in a trilogy and we’re already ravenous for the next book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An urgent fear of otherness permeates Broadway's eerie debut, set in a society where tattoos tell a person's life story and to be without them is to be unknowable. In Saintstone, lawbreakers are marked and publicly shamed, babies who die before getting their first tattoo are forgotten, and so-called "blanks" (whose bodies are free of tattoos) are loathed. Sixteen-year-old Leora's father is dead, his skin dried and bound into a book; she must unravel her family's secrets before the community's elders make a determination that he is to be forgotten, and the pages of his book burned. Through it's not fully clear why tattoos and skin books are the only ways a person can be remembered in this world, Broadway uses her unsettling premise to contemplate grief and loss, attempts to neatly categorize people and decisions as right or wrong, and the courage to push against norms in ways big and small. As Leora enters the adult world as an apprentice inker, Broadway elegantly depicts her discoveries and the way power can become manipulative, controlling, and deceptive. Ages 14 up.
