A review by roguebelle
The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett

dark mysterious fast-paced
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

This book was intriguing, with plenty of interesting fantasy worldbuilding elements to hold my attention, but it sort of fell apart at the end, particularly from a political perspective.
Ekata really shouldn’t have woken up her family. They’re verifiably terrible people who did their best to wreck the country and will certainly go on trying to wreck it, parliament or no parliament. You can’t just slap a representative government on top of an autocracy and assume that sorts things out. Representative governments are much harder to build and sustain. Maybe if Reko had been more of a character, I’d have more faith in this ending? As it is, everything just feels wildly unresolved and unsatisfying. I also really don’t understand what happened with the Below politics; it got whooshed by so fast, like the author was in a hurry to wrap things up.
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