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I came to this book through a Twitter thread by the author explaining the difficulties she had in getting it published and promoted: as it centers on a young woman and has a romance in it, it was assumed to be YA and was seen as problematic for depicting parental and sexual abuse, which frustrated Reid as she as writing gothic horror for adults. I had been perceiving it as YA myself and so avoided it, but knowing the above, I sought it out.

The Books That Burn review on this page is an excellent summary, so I won't bore you by repeating it! I'll just tell you all the things I loved about the novel.

The heroine. So often, female protagonists in fantasy/historical fiction fall into the same stereotypes. Marlinchen defies them. She is quiet, weak, oppressed; her instinct is to placate and obey. She is afraid much of the time. The great rebellions of her story would be minor events in others. She is not pretty. I LOVE her. She's an excellent example of how a character can be passive/reactive while still having agency.

The romance.The romance with Sevas very much serves the plot and Marlinchen's character development - the story is not "a romance", it is not something with a plot plotline and a romance plotline that intersect at points. Sevas is also just as much an oppressed and penned-in character as Marlinchen and the two of them find comfort, joy, and safety in and for each other. Genuinely so compelling.

The worldbuilding.I love a good fantasy world centered strongly on a real culture, pulling from it in ways that deepen the world and also keep it coherent. This one is quite Russian, but also with its own history - it's a city in a region that was recently annexed by not!Russia, and very quickly built up around Marlinchen's family home. A great way to combine the old magic/folktale feel with a post-industrial culture!

Not a typical romance novel! I don't know if this is something common to Mimi Matthews's books, but I appreciated that there's a level of physicality/eroticism without following the traditional romance beats.

Evelyn Maltravers is the plainer younger sister of a young woman who came to ruin, so it's her duty to save the family fortunes and reputations by marrying well - her plan is to make a splash by riding her fabulous stallion in Hyde Park while wearing amazing tailored riding habits in the style of the Pretty Horsebreakers, notorious courtesans who ride on Rotten Row. She visits their tailor, Ahmad Malik, who immediately sees her potential (taking off her glasses, wearing clothes that fit, etc.) and begins to work for her. He's also trying to start his own couture house, and she becomes his emissary and his muse. They fall in love and overcome obstacles to be together.

Evelyn was a good heroine, but I found myself really appreciative of Ahmad. It's incredibly rare, in my experience, for a romance novel to have the hero of a lower social status than the heroine, particularly a trade/gentry divide, and borderline nonexistent for either character to be of color. In addition to that, he faces sexual harassment, something very much off the table for the typical wealthy, white romance novel hero. And I don't mean to suggest that he's interesting just because he checks boxes - he's a kind, perceptive, and artistic character with passion, which is fantastic.

If I have one quibble with the historical setting, it's that I think Matthews is unfair to Charles Frederick Worth in the text (which is saying something, because I'm normally not the biggest Worth fan, I think he's overrated). She attributes gowns being covered with frills and ruffles and unnecessary adornment to him, in comparison to Ahmad's more modern aesthetic of simple elegance. By 1864, simple elegance without heavy trims and flounces was the norm in high fashion, and Worth was at the forefront of that. While I definitely get the need to present Ahmad as The Best Dressmaker, I worry that a lot of people will come away with the wrong impression of 1860s fashion.

I hope in future books in this series, we get some resolution to Evelyn's older sister's story! I'm very curious about her.

So good! The basic premise is that magic exists but is secret, and a non-magician in Edwardian England (probably sometime between 1908 and 1914) accidentally gets appointed to the government office that's meant for someone part of that world; he's immediately plunged into a deadly conflict he knows nothing about, with only his prickly magical liaison for help.

The deuteragonists are Robin, a baronet who nevertheless needs to work at a ministry post to support himself and his younger sister, and Edwin, the younger son of a magical family who nevertheless has very little ability to do magic himself. They're very much foils, with Robin having a certain amount of self-assurance and Edwin being used to his role as family buttmonkey (not a quote from the book), and it's quite satisfying to watch them each find out that the other is gay and slowly initiate a relationship; of course there's a separation in the last third, but we need one in order to have a reconciliation. This is very definitely coming out of the slash tradition, and I love it. Fandom is frankly better at writing nuanced and indulgent romance than non-fandom.

The non-romance part of the plot is a bit less compelling to me. The business that Robin gets dropped into is that someone is searching for a macguffin they think Robin knows about, and they half kill him trying to get it; the identity of the guy in charge is kept hidden until close to the end, but I realized who he was relatively quickly, because Edwin's older brother was set up as the monster of his childhood but never really appeared on the page apart from one brief dinner. This macguffin is also part of a plot that will let the baddies take over all English magic, which is perfectly fine in and of itself, but is it just me or does this kind of fantasy-historical story always involve someone trying to magically take over the country?

The other characters are pretty well-drawn. The second tier of characters is largely female, and while they lean a little toward being Awesome Ladies, they're not too much so. Said ladies are Maud, Robin's younger sister, who wants to go to university but it's never quite clear to me why; Miss Morrisey, his secretary, who is half-Indian and extremely competent at her job; and Mrs. Sutton, an elderly magician with an intriguing estate built on ley lines. Maud is the heroine of the sequel, which promises to be an f/f romance so I am looking forward to that - and I'm hoping that she'll feel a bit less like a "headstrong chit from the schoolroom" stock character when we get to inhabit her head.

I'm sorry to say that this is not a good book. I would go so far as to say that it's a bad book. It is boring, bland, and void of any plot or character arc.

The book begins with a young Dorothy encouraging her sister, Hester, into going on the Dublin stage. We follow along as Hester fails and Dorothy becomes an actress in her place, is assaulted and impregnated, comes to England, engages in a long-term affair with a lawyer, falls in love with the Duke of Clarence, lives with him as his wife for twenty years, loses him, and dies alone in France.

But ... there is no story. It reads like someone took a biography and decided that it should be rewritten as vignettes with dialogue. There's no rising and falling action, there's no theme, there's no novel.

I've always been curious about Jean Plaidy, as she had a great reputation for historical fiction. I knew it was a pen name and that she had others, including Victoria Holt, but I didn't realize that she had six others as well. It seems incredible that she could write so many books a year to support all of them, but if the rest were anything like this, it's actually quite easy to believe. Each chapter is made up of several discrete scenes separated by asterisks, some of them very brief. There is occasionally a moment of interiority, but they do not connect into actual interior lives for any of the characters. Her reputation was, I think, made on the basis of her historical accuracy, which is a lot like Georgette Heyer's: shallow, based on including facts that are correct. Characters don't have to really consider their actions, they do what they do because the biographies Plaidy consulted said that's what they did.

The most annoying thing is that there are flashes of things that could be very interesting novels if written by someone who had any interest in writing a story and exploring what it actually would have been like to be in these situations. The most intriguing character is Dorothy's eldest daughter, Fanny. She is the product of rape, but Dorothy is determined to love her anyway; the only father she ever knows, Dorothy's first lover, shuns her in favor of his own daughters with her mother; after Dorothy takes up with Prince William, she and her half-sisters have to live apart from their mother so that she can devote herself to him and their new half-siblings; she marries a man who is eventually so abusive to her that she takes laudanum to cope. And the book is so unsympathetic to her. The crime of her conception isn't just a problem within the world of the novel, but to the writer, it seems, as she's frequently described as being resentful and unpleasant. Near the end, Dorothy wishes she would go to India after her husband ... you mean the one who treats her so badly? You would rather your daughter be abused than annoying to you? Likewise, there could be so much tension in the fact that Dorothy abandons her children in service of her pseudo-husband, who finds hearing about them unpleasant and utterly fails to help them with dowries even though he'd pledged to and even though the reason Dorothy can't pay for them is because he drains her money. Instead of this creating complexity, it's just that sometimes Dorothy is happy and sometimes she's sad, sometimes William is a nice man and sometimes he's a total jerk.

Quite an epic scope for a novel, and at the same time there's such a cozy domestic feel to it.

The bulk of the story is about Gard, half-demon and half-yendri, from his innocent boyhood in the peaceful forests to oppression by the Riders, enslavement in a mountain, life in the city, and finally his role as self-professed Dark Lord, the Master of the Mountain (different mountain); the rest is about the Saint, the mystical/religious savior of the yendri, a young woman with great powers. Of course, they get married.

What I like best is that it's an amazing story, of course, with each setting and group of characters finely-wrought by the author (who frequently manages a Pratchettian feel in the way high fantasy concepts rub shoulders with normalcy) - but also, a lot of aspects relating to sex and gender feel exceptionally well handled. Gard is a person, not an avatar for a fantasy of being degraded and then powerful or for toxically masculine fantasies of sex and revenge.

There are a few references to ambiguously consensual demon/yendri couplings, and Gard and the Saint's initial offscreen encounter is somewhat less ambiguously non-consensual - but he is ashamed of this, and he makes amends. Still, this is something you may want to know going in. (At the same time, I would normally run like hell from a plot point like that, but in context, perhaps because of the Saint's saintliness, it does work.)

This book is, honestly, extraordinary.

When I started it, I did think more intro was needed. There was a lot of “as you know, Bob” in the first chapter and I just let it wash over me without trying to understand the worldbuilding going on in the dialogue. And I continued reading.

Very soon, I decided that the book must have been originally a fanfiction that got the serial numbers filed off – it was familiar, and the sudden start almost presumed you already knew the characters. Imagine my delight when I realized that it is indeed original fiction, but the very first drafts were posted to a fannish forum I frequented at the time, where I’m fairly sure I read and commented on a few of them! Obviously, this only predisposed me further to it.

What’s extraordinary to me is the fact that in 2021 we can actually have a novel centering on a tropey m/m romance with an HEA published by a mainstream publisher and marketed as sf/f. It’s not segregated into some minor imprint for queer romance, it’s not put into the YA zone. It’s adult sf/f. Even though the romance is strong, we are acknowledging the plot and not pretending that because it explores emotional situations normally left to unvalued fanfiction, it’s “trashy”.

But don’t get me wrong – I don’t just value the book for its symbolic value. It’s a fantastic read. I found myself wishing I didn’t have to go to work so I could read more in the mornings, regretfully putting in a bookmark and going to bed on time at night to save chapters for the next day.

The plot: Prince Kiem is informed by the Emperor that he will be marrying Count Jainan for a political treaty. Kiem is initially very concerned for Jainan’s feelings, as Jainan’s partner (also a political marriage) died just a month ago. Jainan is also very concerned about how he’s imposing on Kiem, what a nuisance he must be, etc. (No prizes for figuring out who spent the last five years emotionally abusing him.) Gradually, as the two handle their diplomatic duties and work to investigate Jainan’s partner’s death, they fall in love, though they deny their feelings until they’re put in danger and have to act on them.

The progress of Kiem and Jainan’s relationship is deeply compelling. While hurt/comfort isn’t restricted to fanfiction (we can see it in published fiction from A Little Princess to Outlander) and the marriage-of-convenience-but-we’re-falling-in-love is a staple historical romance plot, Maxwell delves into the emotions of the situation in a way that people outside of fandom just … don’t. It’s unseemly to do this outside of the romance genre, and in romance there is much more emphasis placed on the physical and erotic aspect of the relationship. (More on this in a minute.) It’s so refreshing to read the delicate dance of these two characters in a published work of fiction. Both are worried about forcing intimacy on the other, but their attempts to stand back and diminish their wants and needs read as dislike to each other; the misunderstanding is fed from their mutual kindness and concern. This makes sense, and is much better than the stereotypical “I hate him, he’s so annoying! But my treacherous body is so attracted to him!” romance plot.

So, what I was saying about romance above. Historical romance, as a genre, is overwhelmingly heterosexual and dominated by formula. (Which is fine! If you like it, you like it, and I used to like it very much.) I read a post on Tumblr a little while ago that helped me understand something I love about all the m/m and f/f fanfiction and non-professionally-published fiction I read: heterosexual romance often feels like the author is referring to a checklist of secondary sexual characteristics that the characters are required to admire, but queer romance, because it does not have such a culturally-defined script, tends to acknowledge the individualism and reality of attraction. Think of the discourse going around about female characters depicted for the male gaze in League of Legends vs. for the female/queer gaze in Arcane. In heterosexual historical romance novels – and I know I keep going back to historical romance but the kind of dramatic, formal situation in Winter’s Orbit is something you don’t tend to see outside of that subgenre – you are very much aware of the main characters’ femininity and masculinity in the way that their attractiveness is described; the hero is always noted for his masculinity and even if the heroine is imperfectly feminine by societal standards, the hero will notice her femininity, sometimes pointing it out to her. By contrast, in Winter’s Orbit there is very little physicality. We have no idea what Kiem and Jainan look like beyond a few basics about their overall sizes and their hair, and while they have sex and recognize each others’ attractiveness, the focus is on how they act toward and for each other, as well as ungendered aspects of their persons. This extends to the entire book: gender is performed through social rituals (wearing a particular material, tying a scarf a certain way, etc.) and outside of these rituals, people do not gender each other. There is no tie between “biological sex” (to use the TERF term) and gender, to such an extent that secondary sexual characteristics are never mentioned. There is no indication that they relate at all to anyone’s self-determined gender or gender presentation. This feels very deliberate to me, especially when you consider that the two protagonists are only indicated with silhouettes on the cover, and it’s fantastic – both for the act of imagining a world where gender is understood in this way, and for what it does to the romance.

The one place this gender neutrality breaks down to me is that all titles that can be gendered use the masculine version (e.g. Prince). This isn’t bad, per se, but it’s not actually neutral. It might have been a better choice to either make up gender-neutral versions (Prins? Empero?) or to make use of the traditional feminine titles as other ranks.

I loved The Goblin Emperor so much that I didn't want to seek out Witness for the Dead - who knows when Addison will write another book in this world, I have to make it last - so I waited until I happened to come across it on the shelf at the library, which finally happened.

I don't know that I would say it's better than The Goblin Emperor - for one thing, TGE is a better entry point because Maia knows nothing about court and the reader learns along with him, where Celehar in WftD is in a world he knows intimately - but in some ways it hangs together better. This is a murder mystery, and an exploration of the outer edges of Maia's kingdom; there are no huge plots to uncover, no questions of "what makes a good king?" and so on. The worldbuilding calms down here in a way that's very satisfying to a reader of TGE, too.

As Witness for the Dead, Celehar's job is to commune with recently-deceased bodies to hear what they can still remember of their deaths or their concerns, which helps solve disputes and clear up confusion (and his job is also also to put down ghouls, bodies that rise from the dead when their graves aren't kept up or properly marked). This puts him in the middle of local religious politics, family drama, and murder. The main murder of the story is a young mezzo found clubbed on the head and left in the water, which Celehar is trying to solve, clue by clue; there's also a woman enticed away from her family and poisoned, which points Celehar to look for a serial wife murderer.

My main issue with TGE was that the pacing of the plot was awkward, with the exciting action sequence that felt like the climax happening near the midpoint, and of course those niggling questions about how despite the fact that Maia is the lovable good boy and underdog, he's kind of ... conservative, isn't he? And WftD has a similar problem: the most exciting part, dealing with the ghoul, happens at the midpoint of the book, and everything else is fairly calm, with no real rising intensity. I was actually okay with that until the seemingly unrelated plot threads resolved rather suddenly in the last few pages. In some ways, this book is more like literary fiction than genre mystery, which relies on a particular formula of increasing danger and clue-finding, but it didn't quite stick the landing.

More particularly, I had an issue with the central mystery - the murdered mezzo. The picture Celehar finds drawn of her through all of the interviews he does with her colleagues and acquaintances is not very nuanced. She was a bitchy, demanding leech who was only liked by pathetic backstagers who were absolutely zero threat to her. I kept waiting for him to find out that there was more to her and make some sort of thematic point, but she was never more than a macguffin to drive a mystery for Celehar to solve. None of the mysteries seem to have much of a thematic point, unfortunately.

Minorly spoilery, but I did love that Celehar gets to find people who aren't so fussed about being marnis, and is set up to have a healthy, loving romantic relationship once he finishes dealing with his issues over causing Evru's death. And really, that's the most important thing.

I enjoyed this book so much, just tore through it! I read it right on the heels of Throne of Glass and while I enjoyed that book, you can just see how much Maas has improved as a writer. I'd also note that while Throne feels very YA in plot, characterization, tone, etc. Court could easily have been marketed as adult fantasy rather than YA (which is probably why I liked it more).

The plot is an interesting mash-up of the traditional version of Beauty and the Beast and the ballad of Tam Lin: Feyre (= Fair = Beauty, btw, took me a while to pick up on that) is the youngest daughter of a failed merchant, and while hunting to feed her family she kills a giant wolf she knows is one of the Fae. As a result, the high lord Tamlin, in the form of a huge beast, breaks into their home and demands that she come back into Faerie with him. Feyre is suspicious, but after days/weeks of Tamlin being nothing but kind to her she starts to trust and eventually love him. But then the larger plot kicks in and we find out that the Fae are being oppressed by a Hybernian High Queen, who has a special need for Tamlin. Tam sends Feyre home, where she finds herself and comes to terms with her mean older sister before returning to Faerie to save her love. To do this, she has to pass three trials and/or answer a riddle, while acting as a servant in the court in the meantime. After coming close to death, she accepts the help of Rhysand, the queen's (secretly reluctant) bad-boy boy-toy and assistant, and finally beats all three trials and solves the riddle, freeing Tamlin who then goes on to free everyone else from the queen's tyranny. Sadly, none of the trials involves holding onto Tamlin while he changes into his beast form, which was a disappointment as I was waiting for that Chekhov's gun to go off. There's also a strong Howl's Moving Castle influence, in that Feyre has to figure out a mystery contract that the people involved can't tell her about, a contract that turns out to involve Tamlin, who's been casually called stone-hearted, literally having a heart of stone.

Have to talk about Lucien, Tamlin's right-hand man. In any other book I suspect he would have been the love interest, as he's charming and has his own tragic past, but who can over-charm/over-tragic Tamlin? Feyre starts to trust him much earlier than Tamlin and I could read a whole book of the two of them being buds.

And Rhysand. Ah, Rhys. We first meet him as a terrifying threat capable of reading or shredding Feyre's mind; at the court, he's a somewhat ambiguous figure who offers Feyre a deal that's better for her than it needed to be: he will heal her if she will spend two weeks with him out of every month. She haggles down to one and they agree. He then proceeds to treat her as his property, a toy to play with in front of the court and Tamlin, in a particularly iddy turn of events. It turns out that he was doing it all to make Tamlin angry enough to take down the queen once he was freed, although I think this is reaching a bit for justification of iddiness. Yeah, I checked Wikipedia and I know the series is overall Feyre/Rhys and not Feyre/Tamlin. I literally cannot imagine how this works given everything Feyre and Tamlin just went through for each other ... but Rhys is pretty spectacular, and I have already ordered the next book from the library to find out.

A good, fast-paced read, but not quite as good as Maas's later work; certainly feels the Y in YA. Can be read as a standalone but is probably better if you continue on to read the whole series (I assume).

To summarize it briefly: Celaena, a proficient assassin, has been in the salt mines for a year when she is taken out by Prince Dorian and his guard captain Chaol to be the prince's candidate in a competition to find the next King's Champion. But someone, or something, is picking off candidates even outside of the competitions designed to winnow out the unworthy. Celaena's heart is also pulled into two directions, between the overtly romantic Dorian and the steadfast Chaol.

The major drawback to the book is that it's so clearly written to be part of a series. For instance, from very early on, I started to suspect that Maas was pulling a Megan Whalen Turner and Celaena was more than she seemed. I think Maas was fairly clever about this, and if I hadn't read The Thief multiple times I might not have caught all of the clues. (And then later on there was a kind of stone maze and supernatural elements that also recall The Thief.) I had to check the description of later books in the series to confirm it, as it isn't resolved in this one, which was moderately frustrating. But on the opposite side, the love triangle appeared to be gearing up to be an even bigger part of a larger storyline - while Dorian is clearly the "winner" of the triangle through the book (I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say this) given his active romance with Celaena, Chaol's feelings for her were pretty much unresolved. But in checking Wikipedia to find out the other thing, I saw that this triangle is completely abandoned in favor of a totally different love interest who doesn't appear in the book! That was frustrating to find out, as I was getting pretty invested in the romantic tension (and I do not usually like love triangles much). I don't really understand why Maas did this and it retroactively make the book go down a lot in my estimation.

There is a strong female friendship, which I loved! Princess Nehemia is a kind of hostage at the court and she has her own secrets, but she is a genuine friend and equal of Celaena and I'm very interested in her as an individual and in her future plotline. The Strong Female Friendship thing often feels pasted in in a lot of books, but not here - it's organic and I love it.

The mystery plotline is ... I don't think it's something to pick up the book for. The person doing the killing is pretty obvious, although there is a twist at the end that was worth reading!

An unexpected gem!

I often have need of referencing biographies of elite and royal women from the early modern period, and I usually do so with a hefty sigh. Most of them rely heavily on primary sources, and I get frustrated at the tendency of the authors to simply take them at face value; they also usually focus on dates and "facts", and only differ from common interpretations if the writer has found a new primary source to incorporate.

Katherine Howard: A New History, on the contrary, refreshingly rests on appropriate secondary sources and contextualizes historical events with scholarship. I did not expect to find this kind of academic approach in a biography of Katherine Howard, particularly one from this kind of small press, but here we are! (And then I found out that the author is still a student?! Incredible.)

For instance, Katherine's relationships to Henry Manox and Francis Dereham. Traditionally, writers put a heavy emphasis on the known facts, mainly that a number of people testified to appearances of active love on Katherine's part for both men. Byrne, on the other hand, points out that those who testified against her had every reason to lie (citing historian Lacey Baldwin Smith to show that it is not unreasonable to be doubtful) and discusses "sixteenth-century beliefs about female sexuality, honour codes, and the nature of the institution of marriage" through, again, the research of other historians. I found this interpretation compelling and well-argued in the manner of a professional historian.

I particularly appreciated Byrne's analysis of Katherine's apparent maturity in fulfilling the role of queen. Queenship studies is a new subfield of history, but is so important to take this scholarship on board when evaluating the life of a queen. The popular conception of the queen consort's role is that it consisted of bearing children and being obedient, but there was a great deal more diplomatic, ceremonial, and administrative work to be done - which you will not pick up from analyzing the primary sources about one specific person. Doing this work requires resting on the shoulders of scholars like Elena Woodacre and Theresa Earenfight, who have laid the groundwork. Again, I want to stress that this is a fabulous good point of the book, not "lazy research".

While this book may be a challenging read for those not used to academic history, it's well worth the effort.

Johanna/Giovanna I of Naples is a queen with no name recognition in the anglosphere. A descendant of the French Angevins who ruled Provence and southern Italy in the Middle Ages, she inherited the throne from her grandfather and would struggle against gendered expectations for the rest of her life. And rather than acting like a modern heroine in a historical novel, she made use of these expectations and tropes when she could in a fascinating version of medieval PR. Still, due to her pivotal role in the Western Schism (don't worry, I also had only the vaguest memory of what this was from high school, too) as well as the brutal murder of her first husband, she went down in Italian history as a voracious, nymphomaniac "she-wolf".

Casteen examines the primary sources and Johanna's lived context in order to reveal the truth behind the myth, and present a clear and coherent explanation of how sexism worked for and against medieval queens.