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kaa's review
2.0
A free copy of the book was provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.
This review is WAY overdue, but, well... as you can see from the dates read, it took me over a month to get through this story. The page length isn't listed in GR, but it turns out, according to Amazon, to be 868 pages. Let me be blunt: this is at least 700 pages longer than the book ought to have been. There is not nearly enough plot, character development, or world-building to sustain such a long book. There was some interesting stuff at the beginning and some drama at the end, but the vast majority of the story was a boring slog through the woods (quite literally).
Despite some intriguing political things going on in the background, the plot in this book is incredibly thin, and mainly consists of a group of characters traveling across the country. Sometimes they fight bandits. Sometimes they encounter a town. But it all feels like pointless action, because it really doesn't build toward anything. To make it worse, a lot of what plot there is seems to be entirely in service to the romance. Big events happen in order to set up various turning points in the romance, or events occur only as a result of complications in the romance. For this much book, especially billing itself as fantasy, I want an exciting story that isn't just romance.
It would take a truly epic romance to carry such a long story, and this is not that. The main characters are bland and, aside from Track's annoying habit of calling everyone his "darling", fairly indistinct. The relationship itself has very little real development, and towards the end there's a "twist" that takes the relationship nearly back to square one, only to have them abruptly decide to pick up where they left off. I'm sorry, but that's not how trust works. You destroy it, you actually have to do the work to rebuild it.
The other characters are even more generic. We spend almost a thousand pages following a group of five people through the woods, and I still have very little idea about who any of them are a people. They are all primarily identified by their job description, and the three women seemed to have very little existence aside from assisting Dylan and Tracker. Authril was the most interesting, and could have actually been a great character if her motives and interests had been more fleshed out.
The world-building also had the potential to be very strong, but again felt incomplete. The set-up of the magical system, with the tower and the Hounds, would have lent itself to plenty of conflict and emotional turmoil for Dylan, and there was all kinds of political drama going on both internally and externally. Yet all of these things only served as a backdrop for the romance, and therefore were left under-developed. I spent a lot of the book wishing Dylan would be more skeptical about his position within the kingdom, but that never really emerged.
My biggest gripe with the world-building, though, was the sexual politics. It seemed as though the author was trying to create a world without discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, which is admirable. However, this was done by removing the obvious prejudices while failing to fully interrogate the ways that sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism permeate our cultural norms and our social and sexual behavior. As a result, the book was filled with inconsistencies in its approach to gender and sexual interactions.
The biggest of these issues, for me, was that Dylan's resistance to his attraction to men makes no sense. The need for "coming out" is an artifact of a cultural prejudice that assumes a particular type of sexual attraction. In the absence of social stigma, this degree of individual resistance to same sex attraction is nonsensical. Frankly, as a queer person, I find it offensive to suggest that the denial of same sex attraction is in some way innate, rather than something socially enforced. (Note: I actually think it would be an interesting experiment to try to imagine a world where biphobia and monosexism existed in the absence of heterosexism and homophobia. This, so far as I can tell, is not that.)
Other questions I had on the topic of sex and gender:
-Why is violent rejection of unwanted suitors written as normal?
-Are we really supposed to think that the only reasons a woman wouldn't want to have sex with a man are because she's either gay or bigoted against humans?
-Are all sexual approaches as pushy as the ones we see Dylan and Tracker making? (If so, this might explain the violent rejections...)
-If there are no other apparent division by gender, same sex attraction is normal, and sex doesn't appear to be stigmatized, why is there this thing about only getting naked in front of people of the same gender?
-For that matter, why is almost everyone so uniformly open to sex? You would think that Dylan, for instance, might have some general hang-ups around sex after his upbringing. (This would have made more sense as a source of his resistance to his attraction to Tracker than spontaneous homophobia.)
-Binary trans people appear to be accepted, but where are the nonbinary people?
-
This review is WAY overdue, but, well... as you can see from the dates read, it took me over a month to get through this story. The page length isn't listed in GR, but it turns out, according to Amazon, to be 868 pages. Let me be blunt: this is at least 700 pages longer than the book ought to have been. There is not nearly enough plot, character development, or world-building to sustain such a long book. There was some interesting stuff at the beginning and some drama at the end, but the vast majority of the story was a boring slog through the woods (quite literally).
Despite some intriguing political things going on in the background, the plot in this book is incredibly thin, and mainly consists of a group of characters traveling across the country. Sometimes they fight bandits. Sometimes they encounter a town. But it all feels like pointless action, because it really doesn't build toward anything. To make it worse, a lot of what plot there is seems to be entirely in service to the romance. Big events happen in order to set up various turning points in the romance, or events occur only as a result of complications in the romance. For this much book, especially billing itself as fantasy, I want an exciting story that isn't just romance.
It would take a truly epic romance to carry such a long story, and this is not that. The main characters are bland and, aside from Track's annoying habit of calling everyone his "darling", fairly indistinct. The relationship itself has very little real development, and towards the end there's a "twist" that takes the relationship nearly back to square one, only to have them abruptly decide to pick up where they left off. I'm sorry, but that's not how trust works. You destroy it, you actually have to do the work to rebuild it.
The other characters are even more generic. We spend almost a thousand pages following a group of five people through the woods, and I still have very little idea about who any of them are a people. They are all primarily identified by their job description, and the three women seemed to have very little existence aside from assisting Dylan and Tracker. Authril was the most interesting, and could have actually been a great character if her motives and interests had been more fleshed out.
The world-building also had the potential to be very strong, but again felt incomplete. The set-up of the magical system, with the tower and the Hounds, would have lent itself to plenty of conflict and emotional turmoil for Dylan, and there was all kinds of political drama going on both internally and externally. Yet all of these things only served as a backdrop for the romance, and therefore were left under-developed. I spent a lot of the book wishing Dylan would be more skeptical about his position within the kingdom, but that never really emerged.
My biggest gripe with the world-building, though, was the sexual politics. It seemed as though the author was trying to create a world without discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, which is admirable. However, this was done by removing the obvious prejudices while failing to fully interrogate the ways that sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism permeate our cultural norms and our social and sexual behavior. As a result, the book was filled with inconsistencies in its approach to gender and sexual interactions.
The biggest of these issues, for me, was that Dylan's resistance to his attraction to men makes no sense. The need for "coming out" is an artifact of a cultural prejudice that assumes a particular type of sexual attraction. In the absence of social stigma, this degree of individual resistance to same sex attraction is nonsensical. Frankly, as a queer person, I find it offensive to suggest that the denial of same sex attraction is in some way innate, rather than something socially enforced. (Note: I actually think it would be an interesting experiment to try to imagine a world where biphobia and monosexism existed in the absence of heterosexism and homophobia. This, so far as I can tell, is not that.)
Other questions I had on the topic of sex and gender:
-Why is violent rejection of unwanted suitors written as normal?
-Are we really supposed to think that the only reasons a woman wouldn't want to have sex with a man are because she's either gay or bigoted against humans?
-Are all sexual approaches as pushy as the ones we see Dylan and Tracker making? (If so, this might explain the violent rejections...)
-If there are no other apparent division by gender, same sex attraction is normal, and sex doesn't appear to be stigmatized, why is there this thing about only getting naked in front of people of the same gender?
-For that matter, why is almost everyone so uniformly open to sex? You would think that Dylan, for instance, might have some general hang-ups around sex after his upbringing. (This would have made more sense as a source of his resistance to his attraction to Tracker than spontaneous homophobia.)
-Binary trans people appear to be accepted, but where are the nonbinary people?
-
Spoiler
Why is marriage being fetishized at the end of the book? It hasn't really been mentioned, and now we're supposed to think it's the most important thing and it's normal that every other word in the epilogue is "husband"?rancidslime's review
3.0
This book isn't really BAD by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a lot of stuff that feels. Ill-conceived.
The worldbuilding and flavor of mages in the book bears what we'll call a passing resemblance to Dragon Age, but honestly "what if magic was dangerous" isn't exactly something something David Gaider invented so who gives a shit, literature is iterative. I think my issue is more just a collection of little things?
First, the dialogue is just not that great. It's not BAD, just like, again, nothing in this book is outright bad, but everything from the joking to the flirting to individual characters' speech patterns feels juuuust stilted enough to grate on the nerves. (except for Tracker's habit of referring to everyone, at all times, as "my dear X". That's just outright an annoying choice for one of your major characters.)
As other people have pointed out, Dylan's discovery of his bisexuality reeks of comphet in a way that feels IMMENSELY out-of-place in a world that has thus far failed to show us any real systemic homophobia or widespread prejudice. What also puts me off is it kind of does the "if it's you, it's okay" shit I haaaaate in books like this. I don't know why a Certain Kind of Author is so fucking enamored with the idea of one half of a gay couple who Isn't Really Even Bi, Honest. Who is this Ye Olde BrokeStraightBoys shit for? Who is getting anything out of this? Who even behaves like this in real life outside of truck stop trade?
Well, anyway, moving on, I couldn't speak to the history or identity of the author but God bless her, the woman writes two cis men having sex like EVERY adult cis woman who grew up reading too much fanfic does. Which is to say, she learned what lube is somewhere along the way and was like "okay, we're done". It's super fixated on anal, the hygiene of both parties at the time is. Questionable. And it's overall just kind of a nothingburger of a scene. (Then again, the m/w scenes are also nothingburgers plotwise so it all balances out)
I will give some points for the take on fantasy races at play here, though, I like the idea of dwarves as a physically distinct ethnic presence being more or less gone over the centuries but a "dwarven" civilization still existing, plus the stuff we see about dwarven society DOES move away from the usual yar har we love to mine fare.
The worldbuilding and flavor of mages in the book bears what we'll call a passing resemblance to Dragon Age, but honestly "what if magic was dangerous" isn't exactly something something David Gaider invented so who gives a shit, literature is iterative. I think my issue is more just a collection of little things?
First, the dialogue is just not that great. It's not BAD, just like, again, nothing in this book is outright bad, but everything from the joking to the flirting to individual characters' speech patterns feels juuuust stilted enough to grate on the nerves. (except for Tracker's habit of referring to everyone, at all times, as "my dear X". That's just outright an annoying choice for one of your major characters.)
As other people have pointed out, Dylan's discovery of his bisexuality reeks of comphet in a way that feels IMMENSELY out-of-place in a world that has thus far failed to show us any real systemic homophobia or widespread prejudice. What also puts me off is it kind of does the "if it's you, it's okay" shit I haaaaate in books like this. I don't know why a Certain Kind of Author is so fucking enamored with the idea of one half of a gay couple who Isn't Really Even Bi, Honest. Who is this Ye Olde BrokeStraightBoys shit for? Who is getting anything out of this? Who even behaves like this in real life outside of truck stop trade?
Well, anyway, moving on, I couldn't speak to the history or identity of the author but God bless her, the woman writes two cis men having sex like EVERY adult cis woman who grew up reading too much fanfic does. Which is to say, she learned what lube is somewhere along the way and was like "okay, we're done". It's super fixated on anal, the hygiene of both parties at the time is. Questionable. And it's overall just kind of a nothingburger of a scene. (Then again, the m/w scenes are also nothingburgers plotwise so it all balances out)
I will give some points for the take on fantasy races at play here, though, I like the idea of dwarves as a physically distinct ethnic presence being more or less gone over the centuries but a "dwarven" civilization still existing, plus the stuff we see about dwarven society DOES move away from the usual yar har we love to mine fare.
cryforhelp's review against another edition
2.0
I felt like a lot of decisions made and reasonings for them (especially on Dylan's side) just didn't make sense. More like the author had an idea of where they wanted the plot to go and didn't take care to make sure that the way they got there was believable and made sense, and resulted in a sort of plot required stupidity. I was excited to read as I love this type of fantasy and was having an acute Where Are My Gays™️ moment. Something like this falling into my lap seemed like a blessing, but its hard to get into it, with this level of protracted nothingness sometimes present in the work. This book is overlong. I have hope for future works though.
dan_ackerman's review
4.0
Although I initially was a little wary of the book’s set up since the spellsters (those who can wield magic) locked away in their tower reminding me heavily of BioWare’s Dragon Age. In the end, though, I didn’t mind the passing similarity and overall, it wasn’t enough of a resemblance that I felt I was reading a work of unabashed fanfiction.
The writing had me hooked by the second chapter. I found the main character’s narration to be interesting and well-woven. He had a unique voice that made me want to keep reading. The plot was put together and interesting and even though it had some predictable elements, it had just as many that took me by surprise, giving the novel a sense of comfortable familiarity without lending itself to being boring.
That being said, there were a few elements that simply didn’t work for me personally. The dialogue, especially the hammy flirting, fell flat and I don’t know if that’s my lack of sentimentality or the writing itself. I suspect it might be me, as it’s a style of dialogue that a lot of books use and one that a lot of other people seem to enjoy. Also, the way Tracker spoke grated at me after just a few chapters, especially his habit of addressing everyone as ‘my dear spellster/warrior/woman/etc.’ It had me replacing the phrase mentally with ‘old sport’ to keep myself from getting annoyed. I also didn’t anticipate the length or detail of the book’s numerous sex scenes. They weren’t poorly written by any mean, although the plot did sometimes stumble into them without warning and a few times the implausibility of the acts themselves took me out of the story a little. My final complaint really comes from Dylan’s denial of his attraction to men, as same-gender relationships come without any kind of religious or social stigma and Dylan himself has no issue with them. He eventually names a few reasons, including a fear of rejection, but all them left me a little unmoved.
Those aside, I don’t have many complaints with the book and the issues I did have weren’t enough to dull my entertainment or the warm fuzzies I got while reading the interactions between Tracker and Dylan. I enjoyed watching Dylan learn about the world outside the tower, the casual representation of other LGBTQIA identities, and Tracker’s tragic past, guarded exterior belying a desperately soft interior, and his single-minded determination to keep Dylan safe. I definitely enjoyed the side quests into dwarven runes and the show-don’t-tell approach to worldbuilding. Any moments of exposition tended to work into the plot, considering that one character came from another country and another had lived his life segregated from the world’s general populace. At times, some of the characters tended into unadulterated archetypes, but the writing style and plot were enough that I didn’t mind and, given that these tropes usually only have cishet representation, I feel that the queer community is entitled to their share of non-tragic predictability. In the end, I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good epic fantasy and I’m definitely interested in the sequel.
The writing had me hooked by the second chapter. I found the main character’s narration to be interesting and well-woven. He had a unique voice that made me want to keep reading. The plot was put together and interesting and even though it had some predictable elements, it had just as many that took me by surprise, giving the novel a sense of comfortable familiarity without lending itself to being boring.
That being said, there were a few elements that simply didn’t work for me personally. The dialogue, especially the hammy flirting, fell flat and I don’t know if that’s my lack of sentimentality or the writing itself. I suspect it might be me, as it’s a style of dialogue that a lot of books use and one that a lot of other people seem to enjoy. Also, the way Tracker spoke grated at me after just a few chapters, especially his habit of addressing everyone as ‘my dear spellster/warrior/woman/etc.’ It had me replacing the phrase mentally with ‘old sport’ to keep myself from getting annoyed. I also didn’t anticipate the length or detail of the book’s numerous sex scenes. They weren’t poorly written by any mean, although the plot did sometimes stumble into them without warning and a few times the implausibility of the acts themselves took me out of the story a little. My final complaint really comes from Dylan’s denial of his attraction to men, as same-gender relationships come without any kind of religious or social stigma and Dylan himself has no issue with them. He eventually names a few reasons, including a fear of rejection, but all them left me a little unmoved.
Those aside, I don’t have many complaints with the book and the issues I did have weren’t enough to dull my entertainment or the warm fuzzies I got while reading the interactions between Tracker and Dylan. I enjoyed watching Dylan learn about the world outside the tower, the casual representation of other LGBTQIA identities, and Tracker’s tragic past, guarded exterior belying a desperately soft interior, and his single-minded determination to keep Dylan safe. I definitely enjoyed the side quests into dwarven runes and the show-don’t-tell approach to worldbuilding. Any moments of exposition tended to work into the plot, considering that one character came from another country and another had lived his life segregated from the world’s general populace. At times, some of the characters tended into unadulterated archetypes, but the writing style and plot were enough that I didn’t mind and, given that these tropes usually only have cishet representation, I feel that the queer community is entitled to their share of non-tragic predictability. In the end, I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good epic fantasy and I’m definitely interested in the sequel.
qui's review against another edition
1.0
And the writing is shitty, with weird conjugation choices, strange syntax, repetitive word choices, and at least one sentence each page where I have to stop and figure out who did what. DNF.
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