Reviews with content warning for Grief - Bonds of Brass

...This is going to be a tough one to rate and review.

This is the second book I've read by Emily Skrutskie. The first one was Hullmetal Girls. From the premise and the first few chapters, it looked like the kind of book I should have absolutely adored. But the deeper I went into the story, the more details I encountered that made me feel really conflicted and decreased my enjoyment of the parts I did like.

With Bonds of Brass, the history repeats. On the surface, this is the kind of story I should be in love with. Space opera with royals! Exciting action and intrigue! A slow burn friends-to-lovers romance with so much mutual pining, so many of my favorite tropes rolled into one glorious mess! But the longer I read, the more complicated my feelings became and the less enjoyable the entire story got.

Let's start with the positives first! The story itself is pretty exciting. It's fast-paced, full of adventure and daring escapes and other super fun moments, there are interesting conflicts and high stakes, and all the tropes that go into the romance storyline are pretty well-executed. The setting is a bit too simplistically painted for my taste, but there's a lot of potential for future developments. The ending leaves plenty of hooks for the second part. It's a pretty good series opener overall. Despite the pretty low rating I've given the book, I'm very certain I'm going to pick up the next part of the trilogy. I'm sure I'll find things to enjoy about it's plot. Oh, and then there's Wen! She's my absolute favorite character here and on my list of my favorite characters, period. She's badass, smart, conflicted, and interesting from her first appearance to the last, and I want to see more of Wen being awesome.

And now for the... not-so-good. I feel like while I liked a lot of the what of the story, most of the how left me frustrated. Or, in other words: the ideas that went into this book were right up my alley. The execution, however, wasn't. The execution, by the end of the book, veered so far away off my alley that it wasn't even in the same city.

This is going to be a long and potentially spoilery rant, although I'll try to be as vague as possible on the specifics. Good thing spoiler tags exist, right?

Let's take Ettian and the big conflict he enters the story with: he is a war orphan, a child of a defeated empire, who for the big part of his life was raised in the victorious aggressor's military school. He's clearly and understandably traumatized by what he went through as a child. He seeks stability and safety, and he believes that being loyal to the side that won the war is the only way of having that, especially since stability and safety aren't the only things he found in his new life; there's also friendship that's this close to turning into something different (side note: much as I enjoy friends-to-lovers pairings, I don't like framing them as "friendship turning into something more"; I feel that seeing romance as more significant or important than friendship diminishes friendship, and that's just wrong). Deep within, he still longs for what he lost, though. This is a difficult situation with no clear-cut answers. This could have made for a lot of interesting and rocky character development.

Instead, Ettian just spends most of the book being hesitant, indecisive, and barely letting his own story moved forward. He was for the most part completely fixated on his loyalty to Gal, which stopped making sense by the middle of the book. Ettian actually spends a huge chunk of the story not trusting Gal and thinking the worst of him, but he still kept blindly going along with the Gal-centric plan that, if it went without a hitch, would ensure the obliteration of what remains of his people. He doesn't trust Gal, he doesn't act like he really likes Gal, but he's in love with Gal, and so he has little qualms with orchestrating genocide in the name of love. That's... um... wow. Way to be a sympathetic main character, I guess. He barely experiences any significant inner turmoil about it, taking two steps back for every step forward or sideways. He's just stuck endlessly in the same "must get Gal home, whatever the cost" mindset with little change until outside forces leave him little option other than act and make a choice. And what little there is of a coherent character arc is obliterated by the final "shocking twist."

That twist, by the way, deserves its own mention. I called it a few chapters before it came into fruition, and I spent those chapters with that sinking "watching a trainwreck happen in slow motion" feeling, desperately hoping that no, the story isn't going there, I'm wrong, what I think is going to be dramatically revealed can't be real. And then it happened and was real and it somehow managed to be predictable and entirely out of the blue, which is a fit I've rarely seen accomplished by a narrative. I mean, in a way, yeah, it changed the bigger story dramatically, subverted expectations, all that. But on the smaller-scale, character level, ugh. It should have been built up more. It should have been built up differently.

Let's go back to the main characters and the romance, though. Gal. OMG, how I despised Gal! I mean, at first, when I just started reading, I really liked him—or at least I liked the facade of the somewhat annoying, but overall charming and charismatic guy he presented. It took no more than 1/3 of the book to thoroughly dispel that notion, and then by midpoint he lost my faith completely when he did a thing that I really can't justify a character who isn't presented as at least a villainous protagonist doing. I mean, well, I could. If he did it in the spur of the moment, driven by fear and confusion. If he regretted it. And the book did try to tell me that it was a fear-driven thing, but the book showed me differently.

It showed me that Gal regretted that the thing he tried to do didn't work out. That he regretted getting caught and yelled at. That he, while without a doubt being a teenager in a very difficult and scary situation, was far more inclined to be calculating and manipulative with an eye on long-term goals than impulsive. That impulsivity was the mask he wore when it suited him.

I mentioned above that Ettian didn't trust Gal for a big part of the book. Neither did I. I was told that Gal had his reasons, that he had his conflicts and fears, that he was worthy of the trust and loyalty Ettian kept giving him. That he was his empire's last best hope, the heir that would change things for the better. But what I was consistently shown was the opposite. I saw a callous manipulator who knew how to be charming, or helpless, or cute when there was something to gain from it. I saw his entire story with Ettian as spun from a situation when Ettian was at his lowest, and Gal ingrained himself into his life and became the shiny satellite for Ettian to orbit, deliberately ensuring that unwavering loyalty. I saw that he was self-centered; that he was convinced that his troubles were the ones that mattered the most, even when it would literally cost him plenty of lives to get what he wanted; I saw that, for all of his occasional dramatic "I don't deserve what you do for me, I can't repay you speeches," he took Ettian for granted, got toxically jealous the moment Ettian started hanging out with someone else, and never stopped to consider the extent of the impact his family's actions had on Ettian's life. I didn't see the good ruler I was told to see; I saw a tyrant in the making.

Nope. Can't ship this.

In fact, if I needed a ship in this book at all, I would be probably inclined to ship Ettian with Wen. Despite the rocky start, they hit it off quickly in a pretty believable way. They have enough in common, but they different enough to push each other to change—for the better. Wen understands things about Ettian that Gal doesn't even bother to acknowledge. She's pretty much the only on who can drive him to some semblance of proactivity. When he does become somewhat proactive in the final several chapters, he literally does this with the thought, Act like Wen. Unlike Gal, she's good for him. I don't really ship them—I really, really like them as friends —but if someone were to hand me a well-written Ettian/Wen fanfic, I would read it. And I think this is a first for me: being presented with a canon queer ship practically made of all the tropes I love, and genuinely feeling that I wouldn't mind if the story went the m/f route instead. I suppose stranger things have happened.

And the funny thing is, I could have dug these characters and their relationship, if it were presented differently. If the author, for example, went straight for the "villainous protagonists" option. If Ettian was very aware of the extent of the horrors he's willing to commit for Gal's sake but was darkened and broken enough to not care. If Gal was presented as a cold-hearted manipulative bastard who has an obsessively soft spot for Ettian regardless—in the words of TV tropes, even evil has loved ones. I do love dark stories like that now and then, when they're presented honestly and consistently. I would have also enjoyed it if there were more pronounced shades of gray, more back-and-forth, more "how far am I willing to go and is the prize worth the price" on both sides. But instead, the narrative tries to present both characters as entirely sympathetic and worse rooting for, while showing something very different. And that frustrated me to no end.

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