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A review by elenajohansen
The Virtu by Sarah Monette
3.0
As with my review of book one, I'm still disturbed by a lot of things about this. M/M romance is completely normalized--in fact, it dominates the plot--but there is still no hint of any wlw characters, which still smacks to me of fetishization.
Though at least the incest part isn't happening, as I feared it would. Mildmay found out about his half-brother's desire for him, but upon reflection, his major objection wasn't that it would be incest, but that he's simply not attracted to men at all. So Felix isn't trying to get with him, and in fact, takes another lover altogether. One he doesn't usually seem to actually like very much, but whatever, because it keeps him off Mildmay, right?
The non-faux-romance plot is decent, but not amazing. After spending the entire first book trekking across an enemy empire in order to find the place where Felix's magic-induced madness could be cured, he and Mildmay then have to safely make it back home so that Felix can restore the broken Virtu. Which (while being a mystical object of little importance to the reader) is at least a reasonable goal for the man who broke it in the first place, albeit unwillingly. It's a sort of redemption arc (I stress the sort of because it doesn't restore Felix's standing among his peers much at all) but it works as a personal milestone.
In fact, it works so well, I'm wondering what the next two books could even be about. A few loose ends aside, this easily could have been the second book of a duology rather than book two of four.
My last criticism is definitely the pacing. After taking most of the book to get back to the Mirador, with the journey being touted as dangerous as all hell, then the ending sequence takes them halfway back through enemy territory to its heart, the Bastion, in the blink of an eye to resolve Mildmay's kidnapping, which happened with so few pages left to read that I honestly believed it was going to be a cliffhanger for book three. And it isn't. The conclusion is rushed and unsatisfying.
After all that, though, I still enjoyed the book. In fact, the highly individualized tone of the first-person narration, no matter whether it was Felix's or Mildmay's, kept me turning pages at lightning speed. And I was fascinated by the notion of labyrinths underpinning both the magic system and the story arcs, and I definitely want to know more about those.
I'm just not sure what to expect going forward.
Though at least the incest part isn't happening, as I feared it would. Mildmay found out about his half-brother's desire for him, but upon reflection, his major objection wasn't that it would be incest, but that he's simply not attracted to men at all. So Felix isn't trying to get with him, and in fact, takes another lover altogether. One he doesn't usually seem to actually like very much, but whatever, because it keeps him off Mildmay, right?
The non-faux-romance plot is decent, but not amazing. After spending the entire first book trekking across an enemy empire in order to find the place where Felix's magic-induced madness could be cured, he and Mildmay then have to safely make it back home so that Felix can restore the broken Virtu. Which (while being a mystical object of little importance to the reader) is at least a reasonable goal for the man who broke it in the first place, albeit unwillingly. It's a sort of redemption arc (I stress the sort of because it doesn't restore Felix's standing among his peers much at all) but it works as a personal milestone.
In fact, it works so well, I'm wondering what the next two books could even be about. A few loose ends aside, this easily could have been the second book of a duology rather than book two of four.
My last criticism is definitely the pacing. After taking most of the book to get back to the Mirador, with the journey being touted as dangerous as all hell, then the ending sequence takes them halfway back through enemy territory to its heart, the Bastion, in the blink of an eye to resolve Mildmay's kidnapping, which happened with so few pages left to read that I honestly believed it was going to be a cliffhanger for book three. And it isn't. The conclusion is rushed and unsatisfying.
After all that, though, I still enjoyed the book. In fact, the highly individualized tone of the first-person narration, no matter whether it was Felix's or Mildmay's, kept me turning pages at lightning speed. And I was fascinated by the notion of labyrinths underpinning both the magic system and the story arcs, and I definitely want to know more about those.
I'm just not sure what to expect going forward.