A fun read, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as brainless as I thought it was going to be! I think this has a good combination of character, plot, worldbuilding, and politics without being overwhelmingly skewed in one direction or another, which is how I prefer my fantasy reads.
Praise: I love a good enemies-to-lovers, and I also love a good human-fey romance, so we were already off to a good start. Also, a lot of the “high” or “second world” fantasy I’ve read tends to set up bigotry between, like, orcs because they’re ✨️so warlike✨️ versus the other ✨️more civilized✨️ species, so it was kind of fresh for me at least that in this book it seemed to be set up between high fey vs. humans based on their access to certain types of magic, with the “good” and “bad” magic being defined less by the actual results and more by one queen who was so pissed at her boyfriend she made his existence illegal.
(Side note, does anyone else feel that the terms high/low fantasy and second/first world fantasy are becoming increasingly meaningless as speculative fiction and specifically romantasy becomes more developed as a genre? Or is that just me?)
I also like that our main character isn’t afraid to be emotional, but also that his emotions include rage and determination and bravery even when being brave means being stupid. He doesn’t need to be saved by our big handsome prince, and in fact he’s more than willing to kick the prince’s ass and call him an idiot to his face.
Gripes: I think this book could have used a better editor. There are a lot of places where the sentence structure disagrees with itself: Page 112, “Practically hopping up and down as he reached the entranced, Cylvan just rolled his eyes and stepped off to the side.” The first half of the sentence is grammatically describing Cylvan, but it’s actually Saffron who’s doing the hopping. And this exact structure shows up a lot. There are sooo many sentences that are structured “[Verb]ing, [character] does blahblah…” but in many cases the prose would be better served by a simpler construction, e.g. “Saffron was practically hopping up and down by the time he reached the entrance, but Cylvan just rolled his eyes and stepped off to the side.” I don’t know if this is the kind of thing anyone else notices but I noticed it to the point of being distracted by it, at least in the beginning.
Additionally, I do honestly feel like we skimmed past the part where Cylvan sets Saffron up to basically be gang-raped a little too quickly? Either that or I read a much more severe implication into the party scene with the powdered fairy fruits, but to me it felt like Cylvan gave Saffron the fruit knowing it would make him incapable of consent, which is why he split so fast after… And then it’s like largely not touched on ever again, even in the scene where Cylvan is begging forgiveness. That was kinda wild.
But still, despite the above gripes I did enjoy the book and I’ll probably read books 2 and 3, while crossing my fingers deeply that it doesn’t take until the end of book 3 for them to finally figure it out and get together…
Rating: ★★★☆☆ – I enjoyed the read and would recommend it to people who enjoy this genre and subject, but at this time I feel I’m not likely to re-read.