Miltantly Romantic

It's been a minute. 2021 was...a thing that happened. I am trying, at this time, to have one post a month. It's the 29th of January, so clearly I'm not off to what one could consider a smashing success, but also, it's not February. Calling it a win.

Other romance-related goals for this year include not losing my mind when the second season of Bridgerton releases and it's all the community can talk about for six months while I mostly want to crawl in a hole and die, getting some more trans/genderqueer titles in the rotation, being a little more willing to DNF when I'm not enjoying. 

Other writing goals for this year: to do it. In any form. Anywhere. We'll see how that goes, shall we?

In any case, as promised in the above title (and the tags, for that matter), a review. Turning this leaf over with Maxym M. Martineau's Kingdom of Exiles.

The subgenre for this one is fantasy, and the world building is truly lovely. I enjoyed the heck out of this book and only have some extremely minor nitpicks to mention.

Our female lead is Leena. Leena comes from a place where the people are known as Charmers, and they use what's essentially an innate ability to draw others to them to tame magical creatures. When the book starts, Leena has been exiled from her home for crimes she hasn't committed, framed by an ex who did commit said crimes. Understandably, she has some trust issues. She's also doing a bunch of illegal stuff to get by. But her competence is established very early, as is her tendency to genuinely care about others, even when she maybe shouldn't. Leena is an intensely likeable character from the get-go.

When a contract for a hit is put on her, Leena forces her way into the guild that has taken the contract and negotiates with the head of the guild, Noc, to get the hit rescinded. Noc, who's got ninety-nine problems of his own, makes a deal that if she can get the guild four creatures of a certain level of skill, he'll "handle" the contract.  What Leena doesn't know is that by the rules of the guild, the contract can't be rescinded, barring having the person who ordered it rescind it or killing that person, and Noc simply intends to kill her once he's gotten the creatures.

In fairness, Leena has forced her way in by way of almost killing his second, so he thinks he's dealing with some kind of criminal mastermind, basically, but I will say, I was pretty side-eye-ey about this.

Anyway, Noc and the three other assassins Leena is going to provide with creatures have to go on a road trip to go get the creatures. You'll be shocked to find out that Noc and Leena fall in love along the way. Then there's a BUNCH of exterior problems that have to be overcome for that love to be even mildly viable. For those that this might bother: this is the first in a planned six book series, and there are elements of the plot that are not resolved at the end. That said, it ends at a HFN place and it doesn't feel like you'll die if you can't begin the next book immediately.

All right, my nitpicks, and they really are minor.  I like very much that Noc is clearly queer--he's had past relationships with both men and women, there's no question that he finds both men and women romantically interesting. However, in a world where there does not seem to be an issue with queerness, at least so far as I can discern, the fact that it is his past heterosexual relationship that sets off a war, and that he ends with Leena because, as one of his male near-lovers explains, "she's the missing piece," it fronts his m/f relationships in a way that his m/m relationships are not. I don't actually think this was intentional on the part of the author. Especially as the relationship between Kost (the near-lover) and Noc has settled into deep platonic love, it doesn't feel as though it's meant to be dismissive. Even so, it would have been really easy for the relationship that began the war to be the one between Noc and his male lover because...their society doesn't have our hang ups. And sure, you have a bit of a kill your gays issue there, but not really, because a) several of Noc's past lovers are dead because Noc has been living with a curse with that as the end result, and b) Kost is still alive and we are introduced to another queer character at the end of the book that it's heavily suggested will play a larger part in the coming books/is interested in pursuing Kost.

Also, with the exception of a few minor characters here and there, for a completely different world, everyone seems weirdly pretty white.

If you are someone for whom characters keeping secrets from each other bothers you, I would tell you to proceed with caution. Both characters have serious secrets, and they are not revealed until well into the book. Some of Noc's STILL have not been revealed to Leena, which is a little squicky, if I'm being honest. They both have good reasons for keeping quiet as long as they do, everyone's motivations in this book make sense, but if that's a thing for you, well, reader beware.

And finally, there's a point in the book where Noc assumes something he is told which is exceedingly vague and he's really dumb AF to make the assumption he makes means one thing and it actually means something completely else which screws Leena six ways from Sunday. Again, it makes sense why he makes this assumption, but also, there's a decent amount of 'because plot' that happens there, which also might be a thing for some peeps.

That said, Leena's a great leading character, and Noc is pretty darn good.  Kost, Calem, and Oz are all deeply engaging, and the found family happening in this is *chef's kiss*.  As a plus, the creatures are interesting, and sometimes adorable. Most of all, I never felt like the plot got in the way of the characters or the relationships, which I feel like 99.9999% of plots do.

I'll definitely be looking into the next book sometime in the near future.

I went back and forth over whether to even talk about this book.  I want to support this author.  She comes out of fandom, she has poly titles, POCs, other stuff I want to see in romance, and particularly in histrom.  And in general, my experience with her on panels is that she's a smart, fun human. 

This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare.  It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp.  I REALLY want to like this book.

That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.

The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters.  Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch.  I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem.  However, that's really all Sarah is.  She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger. 

Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea.  She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book.  There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out.  There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.

Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.   

So.  I have a lot of problems here.  First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman.  We're not socialized to see it.  When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that.  But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth."  There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma.  Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.

Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you."  Uh.  You're offering to MARRY her.  Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met.  At least tell me what that person did for you.  Something.  Anything.  (Nor is this followed up on.  We're never given the reason Alex does what she does.  At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too??  I have no idea.)

Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town.  But it's nutballs?  Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control?  Or federal, if it was a territory.  And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism.  I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States.  I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things.  But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it.  Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.

Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot.  On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult.  Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married.  Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.

The last third of the book is stronger than the first two.  Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead.  There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one.  I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me?  I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.

There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book.