The printing is not quite black, and slightly grainy, as if the text were saved in grey or blue before printing in grayscale this is probably because I have an advance review copy, and hopefully this is fixed in the version for sale. Two technical aspects of this book were disconcerting on first opening the pages.

In some ways the ambition of this novel outreaches the execution, but I’d much prefer that to an insufficiently ambitious work, and Ink is wonderful, worthwhile and certainly worth reading. Vourvoulias’s writing is effortless and effective, uncannily capturing the voices of her disparate protagonists and narrators not uniformly sympathetic, certainly not always nice, but lucid, convincing and consistent. Telling the story of a wide group of protagonists in an only slightly futuristic, and only slightly exaggeratedly dystopian United States in which residents and citizens with recent immigration history are literally branded on their skin to mark their suspect status, it ranges over time, space and magic in a story by turns horrifying, heart-breaking, beautiful, hopeful, frustrating and terribly believable. Ink, the first novel by American and Latina journalist and writer Sabrina Vourvoulias, published by the successful and progressive small press Crossed Genres Publications, is an ambitious book.

Ink by sabrina vourvoulias