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A review by kestrellady
The First Girl Child by Amy Harmon

dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The blurb for this book really puts the emphasis in a weird place. This is not a romance. The main characters in the 'romance' spend most of the book as children. One of them isn't even born until a third of the way through and spend most of her time on the page as a five year old!

My try at a quick alternate synopsis:
After being abandoned by her lover, a woman dying in childbirth uses forbidden runes to curse the six clans of Saylock: There will be no girl children until the men of Saylock learn how to love and appreciate their girls. Bayr, the son she leaves behind, is raised by his uncle, Dagmar, a Keeper of Saylock, part of the celibate order responsible for safeguarding the runes and advising the people and the king. The boy grows up at the Temple, unusually big and strong, but quiet and reserved due to his stutter. When the king dies, a new king is chosen under false pretenses, having claimed a slave woman's girl child as his own. As Bayr continues to grow under the king's hateful watch, and Saylock continues to have no girl children, Bayr must choose between the baby princess he swore to protect and fate that is thrust upon him. 

This took me a while to get into. Honestly, I was much more invested in Dagmar's relationship than in Bayr and Alba's, so things picked up for me when Ghost showed up. Their relationship was really sweet. I loved the way that various religious traditions were blended together to create the religious backdrop of the world. And I did really like Bayr as a character. 
However, I felt like the end didn't really have as great a payoff for the curse at the beginning of the book as I was expecting. Like the point of the curse was that Saylock is a patriarchal culture and they needed to appreciate and give more agency to their women and girls, but they just solved the problem by raiding and kidnapping women from the mainland and buying slaves? And overall the women are still kind of passive in the story. I think Ghost is the one who gets to affect the plot the most, but, despite being a princess and nominally a main character, Alba mostly does a lot of waiting (which, like, she's 17 at the end of the book and she spends the vast majority of her time on the page aged 5-7, so I feel like it's unfair to expect her to do a lot! But the main blurb makes it seem like she's co-protagonist with Bayr and that's just not true!). There's a thread of 'the curse didn't actually fix the problem it was meant to and there's a lesson to be learned here' but it wasn't super well developed, so I don't feel like the end really landed on either side. I'm not sure how much of my issues with this book are that I was expecting something quite different, but overall, I did enjoy it. 
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