Reviews

Grieving soldier-himbo and his emotionally unstable manic pixie dreamboy husband go to a fantasyCapitol for some fantasyPolitics.

A little emotionally exhausting, but the main characters and worldbuilding are interesting enough to finish. Not on my list of immediate recs, but it was fine.

3 POVs, 1st person and 3rd person MCs, palace intrigue, low fantasy, mid spicy, mid kink, lots of trauma.

Bit of a winge-fest. When the action hits, it's alright, but there's a big One Tree Hill "stew in our valid but awkward suffering" vibe. Which I'll usually take, but these aren't short books and there's no relief POVs from the angst. And it's a lot of tell-not-show angst, which is especially tiring.

Meadows kicks ass on creating interesting characters- in addition to endearing characters like Vel, Cae, and Markle (love the signing and language thought in these books) there are some top notch menacing characters and a couple new faces.

Author's still working the kinks out of their prose style. And there's so much prose and internal monologue. The word or metaphor choice is occassionally pretty wild. e.g.

random french words, secular "ablutions," Overton Window = Balding Relativism, burning stable = a dragged to death horse

Kink: speaking of kink, there's a background fixation on D/s play (both scene and relationship.) It feels odd in relation to the first book and fucks with the pacing a little. But the author drops a couple interesting descriptions of subspace I liked. (Though the consent dynamic in one such relationship put my teeth on edge.) It's present enough, I wouldn't rec this book to people who weren't cool with explicit bdsm scenes.

Fashion and Food: fashion people will like the fashion details. There are a lot and I, a heathen, zoned out.

Sex: sex scenes were fine but rare.

And fantasyRefactoryPeriods may have been in play.

Queer Rep: seems pretty monosexual, but good. Lots of gay men and enbies. Also another place there's a lot of tell-not-show re: fantasyHomophobia. There are a few soapbox scenes that have varying degrees of fitting the moment.

Plot: the fact that things just happen to these 20something dudes in an arranged political marriage makes sense, but it's plot/sequence driven without being as exploratory as I'm used to with fantasy. Has light "well, I'm done now!" vibes. No notable themes or imagery to track (could have gone over my head.)

Narrators: The audiobook is the only reason I would recommend this book to a friend. It fucking rules. James Fouhey and Vikam Adam's acting and voice prowess- which notably and wonderfully included getting on the same page for each character voice- are probably the reason I listened to these books entirely instead of DNFing. I hope I find them on more projects together bc the voice matching and acting was so good.