4.75⭐️

Don’t you just love when a book comes out of nowhere and blows you away?

Two weeks ago I didn’t even know this book existed. I like to think I’m plugged into the fantasy space and have a good grasp on the new releases and what is going to be the next “big thing”. But all too often it is books like “The Poet Empress” that end up stealing the show. a friend or two (thanks Shar and Tab) can’t shut up about it and before you know it, it’s in your hands.

This book is dark. But the author, who is debut author by the way, never needed to create that atmosphere through pure shock value. She let the plot, characters, tone, and world force you to be in the mess without spelling out the mess in gruesome detail. I cannot begin to exhaust how well this worked.

The pacing of this novel is fast, but never sacrifices aspects of good story to do so. There are some switches between the present day story and flashbacks, but they are done in a way that flows and doesn’t jar the reader from their momentum.

This is an intensely focused story about a rice farmer thrust into court politics, the crosshairs of a man whose past has turned him vile and inhuman, and a race to save her people and potentially the dynasty she despises, for the greater good.

It wastes no time meandering, yet builds a haunting yet beautiful world in the background of a character study. It presents unique magic, and even more importantly a unique take on some tropes that typically end with a new romantasy best-seller that borders on the promotion of relational abuse.

Don’t let the cover fool you, this is NOT a romance novel. Love is at the center of the themes and the motivations of the MC, though, and I think this will serve for years as the standard for how to engage these tropes with realism and complexity, without smoothing out the rough edges and attempting to downplay some major issues present in certain subgenres of fantasy.

In short, read this novel now. It will hurt you. It will make you think. It will make you angry. It will make you want to turn the next page.

I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.