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.

fits under the uncomfortably burgeoning shelf of 'author REALLY wants 2 have sex with his underage protagonist' with the additional filter of 'author really likes emphasizing the underage traits in his underage protagonist (small! girlish! boy hips! tiny breasts!) Also--a white author coding his world as east asian is inherently /racist/, but the characterization relies so heavily on east asian stereotypes that you have to roll your eyes. if i have to read the word honor one more fucking time. White authors are SO obsessed with Asian honor codes that in replicating them, turn every single character into mindless, stoic drones constantly chanting about honor and shaming their ancestors. Maybe this could have been interesting, but neither of the writers are up to the task. Intricate rituals and etiquette are not conveyed through clever writing but mind-numbingly repetitive cycles of greetings-chilled fruits-baths-fresh robes. Our protagonists so-called clever machinations rely exclusively on ham-fisted contortions of culture and unbelievable strokes of luck. The political intrigue is not many-fold and layered but a very stark line of 'this are the BAD guys!!!' and 'these are the best good people <3' For how stupidly long this book was, for a culture supposedly invested in poetry, no one ever says anything worth noting. And there's so much dialogue, but it's all pedestrian and flat. In a high court, political, setting, there's the expectation of clever rapport, quoted quips with dual meanings, sharp ripostes--but here again, our authors try and fail, covering this utter lack with sentences like 'the warlord nodded in approval at her wit'. Please. There's something so banal about every sentence. Even the paragraphs of ~artful descriptions of setting (which btw reek of the fetishy attempts to imitate east asian naturalist metaphors) are SO stilted and repetitive. 'the color of the sun against the paper screens' FUCK off Fantasy writers often do this thing where, to convey that they are writing about an alien world, make up new names for animals and food. It's not easy to do well, and it's certainly not done well here. 'the shatra birds flew in a flock over the thyza paddies as the neetra grazed'. What have you gained from this. u could have jsut said crane. you could have just said rice. I'm not going to say anything about the big-titty evil concubine. It speaks for itself.