An interesting book and cultural touchpoint for sure; I'll be contemplating this one for a long time. More or less anthropologically though more than as a novel. Where to begin? It's a piece of LiveJournal slash history. It's an M/M romance that has inspired many others. It's one of my best friends' favorite books of all time (he's a bi guy who likes dark romance and doesn't see a lot that represents what he likes, so yay for rare representation!) That aside, what else to discuss??

This is a historical-y fantasy Greco-French(?) aesthetic-cultural mashup where homosexuality among nobles is the norm to avoid conceiving bastards. This is a world where pederasty/pedophilia is normalized in noble Veretian circles along with "pet" sex slaves (and the author does seem to have a thing for boyish, blond beauty which... uh okay...)—pederasty which is in fact accurate Greek history, but it's viewed through an entirely modern lens: our hero would /certainly/ never do that, and an antagonist's character reveal hinges on the moment we discover his preference for boys. (Again, Not A Problem In Ancient Greece.) A pet peeve, I suppose. My hot take is that if you're going to include quasi-historical pederasty in your novel, your heroes should have pretty good historical reasons for not being pederasts, not just "because modern audiences can't square heroes with that icky behavior and only villains will engage in it."

This is also an enemies-to-lovers erotic novel where the heroes do not once kiss or fuck (look for that in book 2, I'd wager) even though the antagonistic MC gets drugged with a sex drug near the climax. Lol. It's so LiveJournal slash in all the best and worst ways.

I liked Damen as a hero a lot more than other reviewers seem to—he's a jock thrown into a world of intrigue and thus uses his physicality as a tool and weapon. That's rare to see with M/M romance seeming to prefer intellectual, nerdy, lithe types as MCs. Well, there's always Laurent for that. (The fake Greek and French names did take me out a bit. Acquitart? TART?)

The worldbuilding isn't particularly thick or convincing, but I enjoyed it for what it is: a backdrop for this person's master/slave kink. Go, girl, I guess? Heed all trigger warnings, as there's a lot of rape and, like I said, pederasty on display... though again I must insist that any time a modern writer writes about historical cultures and fails to imbue their "good guy" protagonist with realistic historical values surrounding sexuality, another classicist gets hives out of nowhere. Like we get it, the good guys only have sex with people over 18 and the bad guys accidentally forgot about Age of Consent in Ancient Greece. Okay. Onwards and let's hope they actually have sex in Book 2; the enemies to lovers tension is killing me.