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A review by helllucifer
Silk Fire by Zabé Ellor
2.0
ARC provided by Netgalley, all words are my own.
WELL.
Holy mother of god, this book was extremely hard to get through.
I'll start out with the thing that bothered me the most in the whole book. Koré, our protagonist is a male courtesan. Therefore, *obviously* he had to get called a "whore" or a "slut" by almost every single character, multiple times a chapter. Every single insult directed at him contained derogatory language about his profession, to the point where I started to wonder if the author had run out of insults. This book literally went "my main character is a sex worker and will be publicly criticized for it at every possible moment."
Secondly, the book talks about a matriarchal society. The book however, does not show a matriarchal society. It shows an extremely misandrist society where women demean and degrade men at every given point. This book honestly at a point felt like an essay about why a matriarchal society would not be a good idea, instead of what it claimed to be. The sexism is dialed up to an unimaginable degree, to the point where it felt irritating to even read further.
Thirdly, Koré. He is quite genuinely one of the most pathetic main characters I've read in a long time. He cannot go a single page without proclaiming that he is an "unloveable monster" and actively harms the plot by taking decisions after stupid decisions. I wouldn't have been sad if he had died at any given point of the book.
Probably the only character who I actually cared about was Ria. The rest were all either written badly, developed poorly, or betrayed each other without any reason nine times. Faziz in particular let me down very hard, because he made a lot of idiotic side changes and kept fooling Koré until he actually could not anymore.
The sex scenes in this book made me cringe so hard, I almost dnf'd the book mutliple times purely for them. I still do not understand how relationships actually work in that world, but I can say that no one is happy.
The pacing of the book was horrendous except for the interlude chapters which were probably the sole thing I enjoyed in this book. They provided valueable insight into Koré's past and actually tied up some of the numerous loose ends.
This book had massive potential. A bisexual character who is a sex worker and gets turned into a dragon, in a matriarchal society where he eventually falls in love with two people, and manages to get his revenge- sounds very good.
This book failed to live up to it at almost every single point.
WELL.
Holy mother of god, this book was extremely hard to get through.
I'll start out with the thing that bothered me the most in the whole book. Koré, our protagonist is a male courtesan. Therefore, *obviously* he had to get called a "whore" or a "slut" by almost every single character, multiple times a chapter. Every single insult directed at him contained derogatory language about his profession, to the point where I started to wonder if the author had run out of insults. This book literally went "my main character is a sex worker and will be publicly criticized for it at every possible moment."
Secondly, the book talks about a matriarchal society. The book however, does not show a matriarchal society. It shows an extremely misandrist society where women demean and degrade men at every given point. This book honestly at a point felt like an essay about why a matriarchal society would not be a good idea, instead of what it claimed to be. The sexism is dialed up to an unimaginable degree, to the point where it felt irritating to even read further.
Thirdly, Koré. He is quite genuinely one of the most pathetic main characters I've read in a long time. He cannot go a single page without proclaiming that he is an "unloveable monster" and actively harms the plot by taking decisions after stupid decisions. I wouldn't have been sad if he had died at any given point of the book.
Probably the only character who I actually cared about was Ria. The rest were all either written badly, developed poorly, or betrayed each other without any reason nine times. Faziz in particular let me down very hard, because he made a lot of idiotic side changes and kept fooling Koré until he actually could not anymore.
The sex scenes in this book made me cringe so hard, I almost dnf'd the book mutliple times purely for them. I still do not understand how relationships actually work in that world, but I can say that no one is happy.
The pacing of the book was horrendous except for the interlude chapters which were probably the sole thing I enjoyed in this book. They provided valueable insight into Koré's past and actually tied up some of the numerous loose ends.
This book had massive potential. A bisexual character who is a sex worker and gets turned into a dragon, in a matriarchal society where he eventually falls in love with two people, and manages to get his revenge- sounds very good.
This book failed to live up to it at almost every single point.