linguisticali 's review for:

Black Salt Queen by Samantha Bansil

4.0

adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

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I received an advance copy of the e-book from Bindery Books and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this! The setting is very vivid and immersive, and I was invested in the characters. I would have loved to have Bulan's perspective as a POV - I think it would have brought more balance to a very Laya-focused story. But this is only book 1, so hopefully we get some more Bulan in the future.

The political tensions feel very narrowly focused, so while they are compelling, they ultimately boil down to conflict between just two families - this doesn't have the depth and breadth of something like The Drowning Empire series by Andrea Stewart (although I'm invoking that as a comparison precisely because there were elements here that felt similar, and I really enjoyed that series too).

Things start to feel a little more rushed and less plausible towards the end, and I got the sense that the characters weren't taking the right lessons from this whole mess, which took me out of the story. 

"We were right - that group of people is bad and I should only trust my family" is not a great takeaway for the ruler of a nation to come away with!

 

 

I'm also not sure how to feel about very literally burying our gays (under a mountain) as part of the resolution?? I do think their messed up relationship has enough depth and development to avoid actually falling into the trope, but it was a little on the nose.

 

The epilogue was intriguing and I'm really looking forward to reading book 2. (Also, the cover is gorgeous.) 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Torture, Death of parent, Murder