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impaled_dragoon's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
fast-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
3.75
I wasn't aware going into it that it had the "fated mates" wolf shifter stuff in it, which almost made me put it down. I don't really care for the possessiveness/obsession that's prevalent in the trope, but it wasn't as toxic as others I've come across. The growling/howling/referring to the wolf in them got old really fast, but, again, the wolf/shifter stuff isn't really my cup of tea.
The characters grew on me, especially after the main character met Ora, and I wound up enjoying the book more than I anticipated. I definitely enjoyed the second half of the book far more than I did the first half, and I enjoyed the queer representation.
The characters grew on me, especially after the main character met Ora, and I wound up enjoying the book more than I anticipated. I definitely enjoyed the second half of the book far more than I did the first half, and I enjoyed the queer representation.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Death and Violence
Minor: Suicide and Death of parent
jsant'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? No
3.75
I really liked the fantasy story line, but the book is unnecessarily explicit. I'm all for a good racy scene, but these felt forced and didn't carry the story line forward.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Gore
kwthor's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Sexism, Transphobia, Cursing, Death, and Violence
vic_to_ria's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.75
Werewolf retelling of sleeping beauty I didn’t know I needed.
I thought I had a great pace, interesting plot and great characters all around that made the story very fun to read and the steaks that actually mattered to the plot and drove the character. Fated mates were a nice touch but didn’t diminish their individual characteristics which I thought was great as they both have their own backstory motivation propelling them forward instead of that bond alone.
Would honestly have loved more Ora (just give me more Ora in general) and the band interacting with the wolf gang. The dynamic was a lot of fun.
Minority representation: Deaf character- sign language talked about like it is more of a dialect of a region so many characters already knew how to communicate with this character , LGBTQ+ representation - I think they handled everything very naturally and informative and I especially liked the gender nonconforming/ non-binary character
I thought I had a great pace, interesting plot and great characters all around that made the story very fun to read and the steaks that actually mattered to the plot and drove the character. Fated mates were a nice touch but didn’t diminish their individual characteristics which I thought was great as they both have their own backstory motivation propelling them forward instead of that bond alone.
Would honestly have loved more Ora (just give me more Ora in general) and the band interacting with the wolf gang. The dynamic was a lot of fun.
Minority representation: Deaf character- sign language talked about like it is more of a dialect of a region so many characters already knew how to communicate with this character , LGBTQ+ representation - I think they handled everything very naturally and informative and I especially liked the gender nonconforming/ non-binary character
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content and Sexism
Minor: Suicide
There are “smut” scenes between main couple. They don’t happen until much later in the book but once they do they are back to back so if that’s not your cup of tea like me be warned there are explicit sexual content scenes.stormeno's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Gaslighting, Grief, Transphobia, Alcohol, Classism, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Sexism, Violence, Dysphoria, Fire/Fire injury, Abandonment, and Death of parent
hannahmichele5's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
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? No
4.0
A romantic, heroic, and sexy wolf-shifter x Sleeping Beauty fantasy that kindly and gently dismantles the gender binary. I thought the world building was really well done and the romance was the slowest of burns but so worth it in the end. I LOVE a fated mates story!
Thanks to Harper Voyager for sending me a copy
Thanks to Harper Voyager for sending me a copy
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence and Sexual content
citrus_seasalt's review against another edition
1.5
Oh goodness where do I start with this one lol. (And if StoryGraph glitches again, I’m gonna fight it lol.)
To be honest, I gathered the plot from the summary and it seemed like a couple of other books I’ve either heard about or read(mostly YA, to be honest), but with queer people! And wolf shifters. (And, the other thing I knew was that it was narrated by Vico Ortiz, lol.) Somehow, that would fit into the retelling genre, although that’s a sort of loose descriptor for the book—probably for the best actually: not much happens in Sleeping Beauty, so as long as you have the sleeping curse and a true love’s kiss to break it, you can fill in the blanks of the plot with whatever you want. And romantasy is a genre I usually avoid, and I don’t like soulmates/Fated Mates, but I was curious about this one.
Arguably, my negative review is partially influenced by my own personal preferences. But I was still willing to go on with the book and overlook my own opinions of some of the tropes, because judging it only by that would be completely unfair.
Unfortunately, my issues are not only personal. For an adult novel, most of this felt very YA. (I get that this is most likely meant to be NA, but still.) The descriptors and the romance were very Wattpad-reminiscent, which started out hilarious but became progressively more grating. There was almost nothing left for interpretation, because Calla would say a character’s motivation for their reaction or behavior, or said character would state it themselves. If a theme was supposed to be in the text, it would be explicitly stated instead of left as subtext. The plot was very formulaic, for it being an adventure it was very slow, and none of the characters felt three-dimensional. Even Calla, who we spend the duration of the novel being inside their head.
I was anticipating Calla’s self-discovery—I knew they would eventually come out in the book as nonbinary/gender-fluid. But there’s not a proper arc for that?!?! Yes, there are crumbs leading up to that point that show they have some kind of discomfort in being called a “woman” or “girl”. Considering how that overlapped with their hate of the wolf society’s patriarchy, I assumed that part of their arc would be untangling what parts of that were them not wanting to be trapped as someone AFAB, and what was them not wanting to be trapped in the role of a woman. Surprisingly there was no discussion of that? I also wish them and Ora had a stronger bond. It’s clear that Ora kicked off Calla’s genderqueer awakening, but instead of it feeling like something to be discovered in the middle of a meaningful friendship, Ora felt like a character meant specifically for that plot point. Which sucks, because I latch onto gender-nonconforming characters easily and wanted to like them more over the course of the story. (And also, that part of the story was so short!)
Also, what was the reason for having a very transphobic villain lmao?!?! (Sorry to my cat, who I accidentally woke up after yelling “SHE’S A TERF?!?!” in response to my audiobook.)
Talking more about characters, the found family fell flat for me. The rest of the wolves in the main cast catch up to Calla during a point in the story where they haven’t bonded with Galen den’ Mora enough yet, so Calla’s relationships already came off as unbalanced. Grae was an…interesting love interest?!?! Conceptually, he’s not terrible, and he has a healthy relationship with Calla, but personality-wise he feels a little too “engineered to be the perfect love interest”. (Complete with the tragic backstory, and the brooding nature.) He also had the most cringy lines in the book. The romances were all very rushed, Briar and Maez’s being the biggest offender imo, but arguably Calla and Grae’s had the same vibe. At least in Grae’s case, him being a childhood friend of Calla’s gives an excuse for them being in love from the very start of the story, but their childhood bond didn’t seem very fleshed out.
(But! The highlight of the cast, imo, was Sadie. Probably biased because she has the name of my aforementioned cat, but I thought her voice in the audio fit her pretty well, and her being both kind of silly and the most ready of the characters to murder somebody made her entertaining. I wished Calla’s friendship with her had been explored more outside of their obvious thematic parallels.)
I’m gonna try to wrap up my list of grievances in this review because otherwise I would be very frustrated, the last things I’ll say is that A) I hated the worldbuilding. Yes, this was European-inspired fantasy, but what are the cultural differences in each wolf kingdom?!?! Besides the climate?? There was a ton of infodumping on stuff like the bits and pieces of kingdom politics, which made listening to this book annoying at times. B) There was clearly meant to be sexual tension between Grae and Calla, but it was very poorly-timed, often grinding the plot to a screeching halt, or sometimes even vice-versa! They got interrupted FOUR TIMES. Literally getting their own room was not enough for most of the book lmao.
I gave up on keeping this at above 2 stars lmao. Even if there were a couple parts I liked, and most of this remained entertaining enough that until the end I didn’t consider DNF’ing it, all the elements of the story get worse the more I think of them. Didn’t stop me from caring a lot about this book for an uncomfortably long amount of time, though. My ADHD unfortunately got other plans, so it latched onto this and it was one of the only things I could think about for weeks?!?!?!?! (Which was an unfortunate, but expected, result. And “AROGB” is an autofill option on my phone now, someone sedate me.) Which is also why this review is so damn long. And I probably read into a couple things too much.
(P.S., to the reviewer on here who said “came here for queer people, left when I entered Wattpad wolf mating territory”, you are a national treasure and an inside joke to the few friends who I told about this book)
To be honest, I gathered the plot from the summary and it seemed like a couple of other books I’ve either heard about or read(mostly YA, to be honest), but with queer people! And wolf shifters. (And, the other thing I knew was that it was narrated by Vico Ortiz, lol.) Somehow, that would fit into the retelling genre, although that’s a sort of loose descriptor for the book—probably for the best actually: not much happens in Sleeping Beauty, so as long as you have the sleeping curse and a true love’s kiss to break it, you can fill in the blanks of the plot with whatever you want. And romantasy is a genre I usually avoid, and I don’t like soulmates/Fated Mates, but I was curious about this one.
Arguably, my negative review is partially influenced by my own personal preferences. But I was still willing to go on with the book and overlook my own opinions of some of the tropes, because judging it only by that would be completely unfair.
Unfortunately, my issues are not only personal. For an adult novel, most of this felt very YA. (I get that this is most likely meant to be NA, but still.) The descriptors and the romance were very Wattpad-reminiscent, which started out hilarious but became progressively more grating. There was almost nothing left for interpretation, because Calla would say a character’s motivation for their reaction or behavior, or said character would state it themselves. If a theme was supposed to be in the text, it would be explicitly stated instead of left as subtext. The plot was very formulaic, for it being an adventure it was very slow, and none of the characters felt three-dimensional. Even Calla, who we spend the duration of the novel being inside their head.
I was anticipating Calla’s self-discovery—I knew they would eventually come out in the book as nonbinary/gender-fluid. But there’s not a proper arc for that?!?! Yes, there are crumbs leading up to that point that show they have some kind of discomfort in being called a “woman” or “girl”. Considering how that overlapped with their hate of the wolf society’s patriarchy, I assumed that part of their arc would be untangling what parts of that were them not wanting to be trapped as someone AFAB, and what was them not wanting to be trapped in the role of a woman. Surprisingly there was no discussion of that? I also wish them and Ora had a stronger bond. It’s clear that Ora kicked off Calla’s genderqueer awakening, but instead of it feeling like something to be discovered in the middle of a meaningful friendship, Ora felt like a character meant specifically for that plot point. Which sucks, because I latch onto gender-nonconforming characters easily and wanted to like them more over the course of the story. (And also, that part of the story was so short!)
Also, what was the reason for having a very transphobic villain lmao?!?! (Sorry to my cat, who I accidentally woke up after yelling “SHE’S A TERF?!?!” in response to my audiobook.)
Talking more about characters, the found family fell flat for me. The rest of the wolves in the main cast catch up to Calla during a point in the story where they haven’t bonded with Galen den’ Mora enough yet, so Calla’s relationships already came off as unbalanced. Grae was an…interesting love interest?!?! Conceptually, he’s not terrible, and he has a healthy relationship with Calla, but personality-wise he feels a little too “engineered to be the perfect love interest”. (Complete with the tragic backstory, and the brooding nature.) He also had the most cringy lines in the book. The romances were all very rushed, Briar and Maez’s being the biggest offender imo, but arguably Calla and Grae’s had the same vibe. At least in Grae’s case, him being a childhood friend of Calla’s gives an excuse for them being in love from the very start of the story, but their childhood bond didn’t seem very fleshed out.
(But! The highlight of the cast, imo, was Sadie. Probably biased because she has the name of my aforementioned cat, but I thought her voice in the audio fit her pretty well, and her being both kind of silly and the most ready of the characters to murder somebody made her entertaining. I wished Calla’s friendship with her had been explored more outside of their obvious thematic parallels.)
I’m gonna try to wrap up my list of grievances in this review because otherwise I would be very frustrated, the last things I’ll say is that A) I hated the worldbuilding. Yes, this was European-inspired fantasy, but what are the cultural differences in each wolf kingdom?!?! Besides the climate?? There was a ton of infodumping on stuff like the bits and pieces of kingdom politics, which made listening to this book annoying at times. B) There was clearly meant to be sexual tension between Grae and Calla, but it was very poorly-timed, often grinding the plot to a screeching halt, or sometimes even vice-versa! They got interrupted FOUR TIMES. Literally getting their own room was not enough for most of the book lmao.
I gave up on keeping this at above 2 stars lmao. Even if there were a couple parts I liked, and most of this remained entertaining enough that until the end I didn’t consider DNF’ing it, all the elements of the story get worse the more I think of them. Didn’t stop me from caring a lot about this book for an uncomfortably long amount of time, though. My ADHD unfortunately got other plans, so it latched onto this and it was one of the only things I could think about for weeks?!?!?!?! (Which was an unfortunate, but expected, result. And “AROGB” is an autofill option on my phone now, someone sedate me.) Which is also why this review is so damn long. And I probably read into a couple things too much.
(P.S., to the reviewer on here who said “came here for queer people, left when I entered Wattpad wolf mating territory”, you are a national treasure and an inside joke to the few friends who I told about this book)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Violence, and Misogyny
Moderate: Blood, Outing, and Death
Minor: Dysphoria
sfdogmom's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Liked the story. Slow burn romance, unmemorable payoff. Very YA. Not smut.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
icelandicbookreview's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Is it too early for me to say that this will be one of my top reads of the year? Because I LOVED this one. You know it’s good when a book makes me cry. I’ve really enjoyed AK Mulford’s books so far but this one is definitely my favorite. TW/CW: misgendering (not included in the content warnings below)
Cannot wait to see where this series goes! Need more ASAP!
Cannot wait to see where this series goes! Need more ASAP!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Sexual content, and Violence
billies_not_so_secret_diary's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
A River of Golden Bones
by A.K. Mulford
The Golden Court #1
Fantasy Mature
NetGalley ARC
Pub. Date: Dec. 5, 2023
Harper Voyager
Ages: 18+
Calla and Briar are twins, born on two different days, and are hiding from the sorceress who killed their parents and took the throne on the day they were born. Their mother's dying wish was granted by a fairy, though Briar was the only child born at the time, Calla came after the wish and her mother's death.
Hidden from all except Prince Grae and his father, Briar is trained as a princess, destined to marry Prince Grae, and Calla is trained to be her sister's protector.
On their eighteenth birthday, they leave the only home they have ever known for Briar to marry the prince. But the sorceress interrupts before the vows are taken and curses Briar into sleep. To save her sister, Calla leaves to destroy the sorceress.
This story started off slow and disjointed. Things were not really explained in detail so I was not sure what really happened to their parents, who Grae was supposed to be, and why Calla and Briar were so unfeeling. It seemed as if they had no emotions whatsoever. They didn't shed many tears when they left, knowing the Fairy who raised them along with the home was going to disappear and not be seen again.
It did get a little interesting, but then flatlined and I got bored.
The blurb exaggerates the monsters and 'dangers' Calla runs into on her journey. The blurb and genre listing also fails to mention this contains porn, and that failure flushed a star away! (If it's listed as porn, I won't request it!) I understand it's a 'slow-burn-romance', but you don't need the gag-worthy detailed descriptions.
As for the next book in the series... Probably not. The story isn't bad, but it's not worth wading through the puke (porn).
2 Stars
by A.K. Mulford
The Golden Court #1
Fantasy Mature
NetGalley ARC
Pub. Date: Dec. 5, 2023
Harper Voyager
Ages: 18+
Calla and Briar are twins, born on two different days, and are hiding from the sorceress who killed their parents and took the throne on the day they were born. Their mother's dying wish was granted by a fairy, though Briar was the only child born at the time, Calla came after the wish and her mother's death.
Hidden from all except Prince Grae and his father, Briar is trained as a princess, destined to marry Prince Grae, and Calla is trained to be her sister's protector.
On their eighteenth birthday, they leave the only home they have ever known for Briar to marry the prince. But the sorceress interrupts before the vows are taken and curses Briar into sleep. To save her sister, Calla leaves to destroy the sorceress.
This story started off slow and disjointed. Things were not really explained in detail so I was not sure what really happened to their parents, who Grae was supposed to be, and why Calla and Briar were so unfeeling. It seemed as if they had no emotions whatsoever. They didn't shed many tears when they left, knowing the Fairy who raised them along with the home was going to disappear and not be seen again.
It did get a little interesting, but then flatlined and I got bored.
The blurb exaggerates the monsters and 'dangers' Calla runs into on her journey. The blurb and genre listing also fails to mention this contains porn, and that failure flushed a star away! (If it's listed as porn, I won't request it!) I understand it's a 'slow-burn-romance', but you don't need the gag-worthy detailed descriptions.
As for the next book in the series... Probably not. The story isn't bad, but it's not worth wading through the puke (porn).
2 Stars
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content