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amy_in_the_city's review
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I'll admit I struggled a bit to get into this book for the first 100 pages or so, but once I was in, I was IN. The main couple had me kicking my feet rooting for them. I loved all the characters in this book and thought they were wonderfully developed. They could have made Tadek a villain or dreadfully boring, as the romance genre tends to do with exes, but they made him so fun while still giving him depth and complexity. I like his friendship with Kadou, and I can't wait to read his book! I want to be Commander Eozena when I grow up, and Zeliha was an awesome badass ruler.
The romance in this was such a delicious, angsty, slow burn. Evemer was so stoic and reserved, which made it all the more fun to see him fall so hard for Kadou. I appreciated the anxiety representation with Kadou and that it didn't make him any less of a badass. He still defended Evemer whenever needed, and I loved seeing a prince also defend his bodyguard. A big theme in their relationship is reciprocity, and I love when couples feel like a real partnership.
There was enough action to keep the plot fun and exciting, but I do wish the villain wasn't so obvious from the start. Also, while this was a fantasy, the fantasy elements are used very sparingly. The ending felt a little bit rushed, and I do wish we got to see a bit more of Kadou and Evemer together as a happy couple. My overwhelming love for the romance and the characters overrides any of these quibbles though, and I know this is a book I'll come back to for rereads.
The romance in this was such a delicious, angsty, slow burn. Evemer was so stoic and reserved, which made it all the more fun to see him fall so hard for Kadou. I appreciated the anxiety representation with Kadou and that it didn't make him any less of a badass. He still defended Evemer whenever needed, and I loved seeing a prince also defend his bodyguard. A big theme in their relationship is reciprocity, and I love when couples feel like a real partnership.
There was enough action to keep the plot fun and exciting, but I do wish the villain wasn't so obvious from the start. Also, while this was a fantasy, the fantasy elements are used very sparingly. The ending felt a little bit rushed, and I do wish we got to see a bit more of Kadou and Evemer together as a happy couple. My overwhelming love for the romance and the characters overrides any of these quibbles though, and I know this is a book I'll come back to for rereads.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Blood, Alcohol, Mental illness, and Violence
Moderate: Sexual content, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Vomit, and Gore
Minor: Pregnancy, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Classism, and Death of parent
heather667's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Classism, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Violence, Blood, Bullying, Injury/Injury detail, Ableism, and Kidnapping
Moderate: Death
Minor: Acephobia/Arophobia
keresian's review
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Okay listen - LISTEN. I stayed up til 2am to finish this. I was hooked. There's so much simmering behind the scenes with world building. The plot is phenomenal. The brilliant way Rowland has woven in gender and sexuality, love and familial bond. I love this book and this world - this is a tough one to beat for favourite of the year.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders
Moderate: Blood, Alcoholism, Alcohol, and Drug use
Minor: Violence, Sexual content, and Death of parent
ericadawson's review
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This book is good if you flush your expectations down the toilet. Three stars. It reads like a fanfiction.
The plot itself -- a secret plot of counterfeit coins -- is weak enough that I don't believe this as a central conflict supports the story or the characters. Development of the crime, clues revealed, and progress made happens so slowly as to run in the background in favor of watching Kadou and Evemer galavant and ruminate and overthink for pages on end. They spend so much time barhopping while accomplishing almost nothing I started to get the sense the bars were there to serve the character tension rather than the characters *and* the plot.
Facebook reads like a FanFiction because you can basically point out every single trope that the author wanted to hit his as though she had a checklist next to blurb on the back, and she made sure it was clear when one was happening. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind tropes in general. I love a prince/personal guard set up. Yearning, pining, all that. But this was heavy. It was a lot.
Unfortunately, many parts of this book feel like this. There's a heavy disjointedness in the writing that doesn't resolve itself by the end of the book. Especially during the first half the scenes and chapters were almost explicitly divided between developing plot and developing romance, with little mingling of the pairs. Then, from roughly the first third to first half the book there was maybe one or two developments made regarding the progression of the plot. Entire scenes would be dedicated just to getting one characters a few points on a certain event when it could have been spared to a later time in order to conserve space.
The end of the book drags. They finish the main plot quite early on, so then the final chapters are spent pining, lusting, yearning, kissing, getting mad about kissing, and trying to find a workaround for an emergency marriage because they want to fuck but there's a whole annulment/divorce issue that gets resolved pretty quickly. It's incredibly boring, besides the blow job scene.
The political world building was alright. I've seen people praise this book as being tangled with political intrigue, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel as if the author herself was even that interested in world building or developing a more complex political world than what we've got. I like the kahyalar system though.
The characters suffer, all of them. Melek is enjoyable if only because çir rather subdued and down to earth compared to the rest of the cast. Kadou has anxiety that more or less ceases to exist by the halfway point of the book. We get frequent mentions of the "fear creature" in the second half with little to none of the symptoms that accompanied its attacks (panic attacks) in the first half of the book. I'm tempted to say it was because Kadou was forced to stop relying on Tadek, but who can say? The drop off is so Sharp and so distinct that I would have to go back and reread the section in order to figure out where the flip happened. Tadek is kind of cartoonish in his flirting and drama and as much as I adore Evemer, his PoV suffered from the same vocal flaws that Kadous did: repetitive, redundant, rumination. Over and over and over.
Eozona was not a character I could take seriously, much as I would have loved to love her. She was rather dramatic at times. I liked Zeliha, and she definitely has a moment I adore. The others are alright.
Dialogue meshes poorly with the world of the author has built. At times it is far too modern, at other times it is just formal enough to pass. This tonal confusion plagues the entire book, and it doesn't relent, not even up to the very end. Some portions of dialogue, especially when Tadeck is speaking, were painful to get through.
Every single conversation is too long. Kadou and Evemer go back and forth a lot on duty versus desire versus ethics. A lot of convincing to do one thing versus another thing only to go back to the start of the conversation.
This book probably wasn't meant to be read as a comedy, but that was really the only way I could bear the beginning of it. Evemer's contempt for Kadou is so dramatic and so intense I had to laugh. Kadou's anxiety is so wild and twitchy I couldn't tell how sincere it was meant to be.
What really impacted the characters, the writing, the plot, the peace and, the dialogue, all of it, was the voice. The writing style. It's not good. It reads like a fanfiction.
Rowland overuses italics. She has no sense of emphasis in her dialogue, sometimes going as far to italicize entire sentences, multiple words in a sentence, or words that don't need emphasizing at all. Hyphens, ellipses, and repetitions abound. I don't want to read the word "oh" for the rest of my life. (This ties into the weird way the dialogue sounds. "Oh" shows up a lot in narration, and the narration was written as though we're getting the characters' thoughts real time, but not in a way that reads nicely at all).
Sometimes she'll use three analogies or descriptions for something when only one will suffice. It makes her writing clunky and overwritten. She's repeated words quite a few times as well, which makes me wonder where the editor was in all this. Run on sentences (and not the pleasant kind) are also commonplace. We edge the border of getting a wall of text whenever Tadek shows up because he simply doesn't shut up.
I'd copy and paste a block of text as an example, but much of the narration reads like this:
"But Kadou...Kadou was *tired*. He was *scared* and *terrfied*, and he trembled like a leaf in the wind because what else was there to do? Evemer was hurt. Badly hurt. Oh so badly hurt. And that was terrifying and *scary*. Oh, Kadou didn't know what to do with himself. He trembled, the fear-creature *screamed* at him like it wanted to rip him apart, sink its teeth into him, and eat him, skin and bones and tissue and all, and Evemer had no choice but to *let* it."
Rowland destroys tension with poor dialogue, formatting, structure, and narrative descriptions. There was more than one occasion where I couldn't tell which character had just said a piece of dialogue because of her tendency to have character A interrupt character Bs dialogue with an action and then go back to character A talking.
Plenty of time spent describing outfit colors, but I have no idea what Evemer (or really anyone, but especially him) looks like.
Weird formatting quirk where the capital letter T after an end quote looked like it had no space (and sometimes it didn't have one, I think.)
This book is 570 pages because most of it is redundancues and repetition with little to no payoff. Utterly tedious, though it did show me that I enjoy slow burns and semi enemies to lovers a lot.
Three stars. If you "shut your brain off" you'd actually quite enjoy it.
The plot itself -- a secret plot of counterfeit coins -- is weak enough that I don't believe this as a central conflict supports the story or the characters. Development of the crime, clues revealed, and progress made happens so slowly as to run in the background in favor of watching Kadou and Evemer galavant and ruminate and overthink for pages on end. They spend so much time barhopping while accomplishing almost nothing I started to get the sense the bars were there to serve the character tension rather than the characters *and* the plot.
Facebook reads like a FanFiction because you can basically point out every single trope that the author wanted to hit his as though she had a checklist next to blurb on the back, and she made sure it was clear when one was happening. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind tropes in general. I love a prince/personal guard set up. Yearning, pining, all that. But this was heavy. It was a lot.
Unfortunately, many parts of this book feel like this. There's a heavy disjointedness in the writing that doesn't resolve itself by the end of the book. Especially during the first half the scenes and chapters were almost explicitly divided between developing plot and developing romance, with little mingling of the pairs. Then, from roughly the first third to first half the book there was maybe one or two developments made regarding the progression of the plot. Entire scenes would be dedicated just to getting one characters a few points on a certain event when it could have been spared to a later time in order to conserve space.
The end of the book drags. They finish the main plot quite early on, so then the final chapters are spent pining, lusting, yearning, kissing, getting mad about kissing, and trying to find a workaround for an emergency marriage because they want to fuck but there's a whole annulment/divorce issue that gets resolved pretty quickly. It's incredibly boring, besides the blow job scene.
The political world building was alright. I've seen people praise this book as being tangled with political intrigue, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel as if the author herself was even that interested in world building or developing a more complex political world than what we've got. I like the kahyalar system though.
The characters suffer, all of them. Melek is enjoyable if only because çir rather subdued and down to earth compared to the rest of the cast. Kadou has anxiety that more or less ceases to exist by the halfway point of the book. We get frequent mentions of the "fear creature" in the second half with little to none of the symptoms that accompanied its attacks (panic attacks) in the first half of the book. I'm tempted to say it was because Kadou was forced to stop relying on Tadek, but who can say? The drop off is so Sharp and so distinct that I would have to go back and reread the section in order to figure out where the flip happened. Tadek is kind of cartoonish in his flirting and drama and as much as I adore Evemer, his PoV suffered from the same vocal flaws that Kadous did: repetitive, redundant, rumination. Over and over and over.
Eozona was not a character I could take seriously, much as I would have loved to love her. She was rather dramatic at times. I liked Zeliha, and she definitely has a moment I adore. The others are alright.
Dialogue meshes poorly with the world of the author has built. At times it is far too modern, at other times it is just formal enough to pass. This tonal confusion plagues the entire book, and it doesn't relent, not even up to the very end. Some portions of dialogue, especially when Tadeck is speaking, were painful to get through.
Every single conversation is too long. Kadou and Evemer go back and forth a lot on duty versus desire versus ethics. A lot of convincing to do one thing versus another thing only to go back to the start of the conversation.
This book probably wasn't meant to be read as a comedy, but that was really the only way I could bear the beginning of it. Evemer's contempt for Kadou is so dramatic and so intense I had to laugh. Kadou's anxiety is so wild and twitchy I couldn't tell how sincere it was meant to be.
What really impacted the characters, the writing, the plot, the peace and, the dialogue, all of it, was the voice. The writing style. It's not good. It reads like a fanfiction.
Rowland overuses italics. She has no sense of emphasis in her dialogue, sometimes going as far to italicize entire sentences, multiple words in a sentence, or words that don't need emphasizing at all. Hyphens, ellipses, and repetitions abound. I don't want to read the word "oh" for the rest of my life. (This ties into the weird way the dialogue sounds. "Oh" shows up a lot in narration, and the narration was written as though we're getting the characters' thoughts real time, but not in a way that reads nicely at all).
Sometimes she'll use three analogies or descriptions for something when only one will suffice. It makes her writing clunky and overwritten. She's repeated words quite a few times as well, which makes me wonder where the editor was in all this. Run on sentences (and not the pleasant kind) are also commonplace. We edge the border of getting a wall of text whenever Tadek shows up because he simply doesn't shut up.
I'd copy and paste a block of text as an example, but much of the narration reads like this:
"But Kadou...Kadou was *tired*. He was *scared* and *terrfied*, and he trembled like a leaf in the wind because what else was there to do? Evemer was hurt. Badly hurt. Oh so badly hurt. And that was terrifying and *scary*. Oh, Kadou didn't know what to do with himself. He trembled, the fear-creature *screamed* at him like it wanted to rip him apart, sink its teeth into him, and eat him, skin and bones and tissue and all, and Evemer had no choice but to *let* it."
Rowland destroys tension with poor dialogue, formatting, structure, and narrative descriptions. There was more than one occasion where I couldn't tell which character had just said a piece of dialogue because of her tendency to have character A interrupt character Bs dialogue with an action and then go back to character A talking.
Plenty of time spent describing outfit colors, but I have no idea what Evemer (or really anyone, but especially him) looks like.
Weird formatting quirk where the capital letter T after an end quote looked like it had no space (and sometimes it didn't have one, I think.)
This book is 570 pages because most of it is redundancues and repetition with little to no payoff. Utterly tedious, though it did show me that I enjoy slow burns and semi enemies to lovers a lot.
Three stars. If you "shut your brain off" you'd actually quite enjoy it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness
Moderate: Cursing and Blood
20sidedbi's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders, Kidnapping, and Alcohol
Minor: Injury/Injury detail, Pregnancy, Blood, Sexual content, Death of parent, and Animal death
kimschouwenaar's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
Is the story plausible? Not exactly.
Is it historically accurate? Probably not.
Is it enjoyable? Yes, but I will not be re-reading, and this has not become one of my favourite reads.
Besides the fact that I just could not connect to the two main characters, the pacing is off. Some scattered moments were exciting, but overall I was a little bored. Then there is the wording and dialogue, which was a peculiar mix of historical and modern speech. For some it might work, but for me it was confusing.
Additionally, I simply do not understand why in such a seemingly modern and advanced society, there is such an ignorance towards mental health issues. There are multiple characters using neo-pronouns (a fact I absolutely ADORE), they seem to have equal rights for men and women, and the sultan is a woman with a new-born (!!!!) (Zeliha and Eyne were an absolutely delightful addition to the story). Also, there was an aro-ace character that uses çe/çem/çir!
It could have been great, but to me it wasn’t.
Is it historically accurate? Probably not.
Is it enjoyable? Yes, but I will not be re-reading, and this has not become one of my favourite reads.
Besides the fact that I just could not connect to the two main characters, the pacing is off. Some scattered moments were exciting, but overall I was a little bored. Then there is the wording and dialogue, which was a peculiar mix of historical and modern speech. For some it might work, but for me it was confusing.
Additionally, I simply do not understand why in such a seemingly modern and advanced society, there is such an ignorance towards mental health issues. There are multiple characters using neo-pronouns (a fact I absolutely ADORE), they seem to have equal rights for men and women, and the sultan is a woman with a new-born (!!!!) (Zeliha and Eyne were an absolutely delightful addition to the story). Also, there was an aro-ace character that uses çe/çem/çir!
It could have been great, but to me it wasn’t.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Murder, Blood, Violence, Cursing, Death, Gaslighting, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, and Gore
Moderate: Alcohol, Eating disorder, Kidnapping, Alcoholism, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Sexual content, and Grief
bookcaptivated's review
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Death, Murder, Blood, Injury/Injury detail, and Panic attacks/disorders
Moderate: Sexual content, Grief, Kidnapping, and Alcohol
Minor: Classism, Confinement, Cursing, and Animal death
ofbooksandechos's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
This was disappointing, I expected to have more well rounded characters, as well as a compelling mystery/plot to threat to the country, but I got none of those. The romance was also pretty easygoing, I expected to see more trials and more nuance on the power dynamics involved but alas, those were left to the reader’s imagination.
Ps: I found out later about this but an Ottoman Empire inspired fantasy by a white American author left me with a lot of mixed feelings.
I did enjoy the queer normative world though.
Ps: I found out later about this but an Ottoman Empire inspired fantasy by a white American author left me with a lot of mixed feelings.
I did enjoy the queer normative world though.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders
Moderate: Alcohol, Blood, Injury/Injury detail, and Kidnapping
Minor: Sexual content
dododenise's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This was exactly my taste. It’s been a while since I took my time and just cherished the book I am reading but I simply didn’t want this book to end.
The story is almost entirely character focused and I loved that. The plot, including politics, mysteries, violence and betrayal served only the characters. Because of that the plot itself wasn’t revolutionary. Instead, there was so much care put into the characters.
It was a delicious slow burn, with so much yearning and pining. Getting so close to getting together and then pulling apart again and it just pulled at my heartstrings with them. There were so many tender moments between them. The book took its time on long conversation and really developing the characters and their relationships. This was a slow burn perfectly executed. And added to that, a wonderful cast of side characters that I have also learned to adore, including a nonbinary aro ace character who I obviously was a fan of. But all of them found a place in my heart.
Just give me hundreds of books like this and I will be happy.
The story is almost entirely character focused and I loved that. The plot, including politics, mysteries, violence and betrayal served only the characters. Because of that the plot itself wasn’t revolutionary. Instead, there was so much care put into the characters.
It was a delicious slow burn, with so much yearning and pining. Getting so close to getting together and then pulling apart again and it just pulled at my heartstrings with them. There were so many tender moments between them. The book took its time on long conversation and really developing the characters and their relationships. This was a slow burn perfectly executed. And added to that, a wonderful cast of side characters that I have also learned to adore, including a nonbinary aro ace character who I obviously was a fan of. But all of them found a place in my heart.
Just give me hundreds of books like this and I will be happy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Violence, Mental illness, Confinement, Panic attacks/disorders, and Kidnapping
Moderate: Classism, Injury/Injury detail, Death, Alcohol, Sexual content, and Animal death
Minor: Pregnancy and Grief
thecatconstellation's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
I love the anxiety rep & the gender and sexuality rep. Cuuuuteeee relationship. Decent plot.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Violence, and Kidnapping
Moderate: Murder, Confinement, Injury/Injury detail, and Sexual content
Minor: Blood, Alcohol, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, War, and Pregnancy