flowery and cheesy and purple as fuck. Some of the most ridiculous shit I've ever read, but interspersed with hilarious dialogue as the fmc uses her utter lack of guile to charm her way through a pirate crew.

Example of the snappy dialogue, from a scene where the pirates are (jokingly) interrogating our female lead and she is being tight-lipped:

“A woman of mystery,” said Morgan, at the side table, pouring himself wine. “Cat, fetch the thumbscrew.” Cat snapped his fingers with apparent regret. “I can’t remember where I put it. It’s been a while since I’ve screwed any thumbs. Captain, sir, it’s the iron maiden or nothing.” “If you say so, child.” Morgan rested his long body on a chair arm. “Personally, I can see her lashed to the yardarm, bared to the waist. I’m all in favor of something really vile and modern. Shall we bring it to the crew for a vote?”

another one:

Merry said, “I don’t have anything to wear because yesterday—in case you’ve forgotten—you cut off my clothes. With dispatch.” “You’d have preferred to be stripped lingeringly? I’ll remember that for next time.” “I’d have preferred not to be stripped at all! Do you know what? I wouldn’t apply a letter opener to an envelope the way you put your knife to me. Pardon me for my state of undress. Jack and Biddles forgot to let me pack a night bag.” “What do you expect from the scum of the streets? I hired them as burglars, not ladies’ maids.” He lifted the green film of fabric from his arm and sent it floating down on the bed. “Here you are. Fresh from Paris."

note of warning: to my jaded eyes, this was tame, but it very much has the classic bodice ripper problems (betraying body syndrome, lots of kidnapping and handcuffs, threats of violence, etc).

The first half was such a slog that I opened up the first book in the trilogy to compare it to, and indeed there's a certain snappiness that's missing.

Fawcett takes a page from Holly Black's Faerie--higher stakes, immoral high Fae, court politics--and in doing so, loses much of the quirky charm that categorized the first book. I didn't come here to see Bambleby's swordfighting, Fawcett. I'm here for his frenetic sewing.

At around the midway point, Emily remembers who tf she is and the pace picks up significantly, but its still missing that dry, sharp humor that so classified the first book in the series, leaning more into that so dreaded word: cozy. There are only so many friendly reunions and baked goods hot from the oven and cutesy cottage retreats that I can take.

You ever read a book and just know the author loves to take really really long walks. This was probably craaazzzyyy back in ‘96 when it was published, but by now it feels a little dated, unfortunately, hitting every trope of adventure/travel fantasy for the slog that was the first half of this book. Bread and cheese! Stew! Horses! I did appreciate how SHORT this was thought—it came, told its story, and wrapped it up. I’m so sick of the 700 page doorstoppers.

say what you want about older historical romances, but those girls could W R I T E.

Beautiful passages and a beautiful character study. The plot meanders and the chemistry is kind of..not there...but Ivory is never ever lazy! Every setting is lovingly rendered--not the standard townhouses and sprawling estates of every regency historical but specific, unique places all, down to the ephemera of junk drawers. Even the smallest side character gets the benefit of her lavish attentions, familiar stock roles enriched into intriguing characters in their own right. No one is innocent, but no one is strictly evil either, compelling in their shades of gray.

I also looveee when a character who never appears on screen nonetheless haunts the narrative.

what the fuck, kinsale There was...an attempt...to investigate/explore trauma. It was a bad attempt. You can see the kernels of beautiful writing and rich character dynamics that make Kinsale's later books shine here, but it is overshadowed by racist shlock so implausible heinous that it circles around to being fucking hilarious. I'm not surprised by it, and have come to expect a certain amount in historical romances, which, by the standard conventions, glorify the british empire at the height of its monstrosity, but this was crazy even to my jaded eyes.

Political fantasy with some of THE MOST scattered, disjointed prose I've ever read. I have to assume that an editor told Omer that description was lacking, so she went in and added sentences without thinking about how it changed the rhythm of the narrative. Too many disparate thoughts are packed together with so little connective tissue between them that I had to reread a few times before I understood its inclusion. Example from a chaotic battle scene:

Nohra willed her hand to close. Her muscles strained as she tried to pull the sickle-staff into her lap. Her head swam. Wincing, she shut her eyes. White starbursts exploded behind her eyelids. Still so weak. If she could just stand and fight, she could protect them. Her hands grasped something: fingers. Darya, smelling like a camp cookfire instead of fresh-baked bread and the palace's lavender soap. She could recite the names of all the constellations and would feed sugarwater to dying butterflies. Darya's hand was even hotter than Nohra's feverish skin. She couldn't shield her now.

The sugar water and butterflies sentence is technically fine but so jarring in the midst of everything else. This happens constantly, usually with bits of lore unnecessarily clunked in. Despite this huge amount of description, I always had zero spatial awareness of where anything was in any given scene. It's like all the characters/things were floating around in their various set pieces, or that things are teleporting in. The most comprehensible example I can give out of context is a banquet scene, which reads like this:

(long description of different foods on the table) a character speaks (another description of food on the table, different than the first, as if they glitched into being) a character speaks (ANOTHER description of things on the table, this time of the liquid variety).

This could have been so easily fixed. Instead of Bataar noticing on his third pass that "the low tables were full of glasses of..." he could have TAKEN A SIP. No one is grounded in the environment because no one is interacting with it! And how can they, when there's SO much over-indulgent detail to wade through, with no sense of hierarchy between major and minor details. Everything is given the same narrative weight. You can see this most prominently in the gore, which is heavy-handed in a cartoonish way, to the point of having no impact at all. I was about as affected by chunks of people and burned bodies as an episode of tom and jerry where tom gets put through a cheese grater or something.

I would not mind clumsy writing if I cared about the characters. But these people mean nothing to me. No one is interesting. Our main characters lack conviction and consistent reasoning for their actions--I simply don't believe them. (Bataar tells us he's conquering the world to...bring peace? But it feels like a tacked on afterthought. He's really conquering the world because the plot wouldn't happen if he didn't.). There are plenty of side characters that are supposed to be wry and quippy (the standard 'snarky second-in-command' archetype, meant as a foil to the more serious protagonists), but the jokes are weirdly timed and juvenile.

Bataar also, despite ostensibly being a powerful nomadic conqueror the likes of Timur and Chingez, is so unbelievably sauceless. Just utterly without charisma. I wouldn't follow him into a seedy restaurant, let alone a battlefield. This would be...fine...if the goal wasn't a budding romance with the other protagonist, a person whose home/life/family he destroyed(do you see why some manner of sex appeal or charm would be necessary here). The interactions between our two leads made me grimace every single time, most of it falling along the contrived lines of her tripping and him catching her. This might be enough for a k-drama about a workplace crush. It's certainly not enough for FANTASY PUTIN?

This tracks for Nohra, the other protagonist, who is basically a lump of wet tissues narratively. Nowhere does she do something that changes the course of the plot, despite being a pegasus-riding warrior princess with a giant scythe. She muscles into rooms where Things are Happening, sure that she alone can fix everything, and once there, becomes a passive observer. All of her plans flop over--and not because Bataar is outwitting her either. Someone just tells him 'hey guess what nohra's up to'.

I WANT to like this because the concept is brave and there's obviously a lot of thought put into the world. Maybe with a more ruthless editor, this could have been really good. Another example of cool idea/clumsy execution, which seems to be the standard of 2025 fantasy releases thus far.

There's just such a fundamental lack of craft on display here, down to a sentence level. This reads like an unedited first draft, full of grammatical errors (the commas! good lord) and deeply weird tonal inconsistency. The closest comparison I can make is a late-stage Marvel movie: juvenile 'he's right behind me, isn't he?' humor, a reliance on contrived twists over satisfying character arcs, lengthy villain monologues, spoon-fed realizations, an utter lack of consequences (you're fired! never mind! you're in prison! just kidding! you're dead! no you're not!), multiple and jarring POV shifts in every scene, and just a consistent sense of things being pulled out of asses.