Review by creadsfantasy - Warrior Princess Assassin

creadsfantasy 's review for:

Warrior Princess Assassin by Brigid Kemmerer

4.75

adventurous dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC of Warrior Princess Assassin. To start off, I strongly dislike the name of this book because it feels like it needs punctuation, but that is the ONLY thing about this whole book I don’t like. It was perfectly done. I had the privilege to hear Brigid talk about writing this last year and I was so excited to receive an advanced copy. She has shown how skilled she is, once again, by switching audiences (YA to adult) while still keeping the emotional depth and character growth she is known for. I thought this was her best so far.

I love how Kemmerer portrays all kinds of relationships, disabilities, trauma responses, and moral gray areas while compassionately writing some really complicated and frustrating characters -and also some perfect favorite ones. This book was a stellar example of her craft. I loved how well she did the central romance which was perfectly paced, deeply emotional, and the yearning was perfection. She always makes an intentional effort to portray real, loving, complicated, and accurate romances both queer and straight. I thought the way the three main characters interacted and loved each other was so well done and I was rooting for all of them. I do have my favorite though, who is one of those all time best characters in a book and I have a feeing he’s going to get better in the next one as she continues to develop his character and shows more of his relationship with his sister. The setting and world building were also excellent, though the romance was definitely the key theme of this book. I would recommend this to anyone who loves fantasy romance with deep character work, or really anyone who should love it and hasn’t found the right one yet.