tilly_wizard's reviews
174 reviews

Well, that was an insufferably boring 600 pages of nothing happening.

Considering the title (subtext!) and the obvious (superficial) similarities to Riverside, I was hyped for this to be the gayest book. Unfortunately Clare has stuck with her usual modus operandi of establishing the two main male characters as having a very close bond, and then immediately sticking a woman in the middle. Writing stories about male friendships is a cool and good thing to do! But CC has been writing about men in life-long partnerships for twenty years, but she has never once just let it be gay, and this time I was hoping for a different flavour, or at least a deep exploration of the concept, which the book doesn't deliver on.

I see all the comparisons to The Shades of Magic, which are certainly worth talking about, but I wouldn't go so far as to call this 'plagiarism' just because CC has undeniably borrowed a character name and basic concept as a starting point, and it's not as if Schwab was the first author to have the idea of a 'layered' city, either.
As the first book in a trilogy, in comparison to A Darker Shade of Magic, by my reckoning Sword Catcher comes out quite far ahead, because the prince actually exists as a character in this one (he's not a terribly interesting or likeable character, but he is at least present in the story, which is more than can be said for Rhy), and as weak as the worldbuilding is here, CC has at least made more of an attempt at giving her world a history than Schwab, who had one good idea for a setting but failed to develop it at all beyond the most basic aesthetic.
CC takes about as much inspiration from Shades of Magic as she does from ASoIaF, Riverside, Six of Crows, and probably other things I'm not familiar with. What is worth complaining about is that her obnoxious habit of lifting 'funny' quotes from TV and movies and putting them in the mouths of her characters is still alive and well. The first time I got close to throwing the book was within the first couple of chapters, when one of the characters makes the 'tracts of land' joke from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As is usual for YA authors attempting to transition into adult (Roshani Chokshi, Hannah Whitten, Leigh Bardugo etc al), this reads almost exactly the same as a typical YA novel in terms of its prose, plot beats, and character dynamics, but the pacing is (painfully) slower, the characters are slightly older and there are more mentions of sex and swears (although surprisingly little sex is actually accomplished, with the 'steamiest' scene being a flashback/dream vision about historical figures).

Speaking of which, what the fuck was the love...polygon in this book? The marketing is selling us 'forbidden love', but it's unclear which pairing it's referring to - every pairing is 'forbidden' in some way (Kel's secret identity as the prince's body-double precludes any romance for him; Prince Conor can't pursue Lin because she's Jewish Ashkar; a lot of boring politics gets in the way of either man romancing Antonetta), but all of these half-formed attractions are happening at once, as the characters are being switched around between different combinations, with the result that no two characters have enough scenes together to build a romance with enough emotional depth to be worth caring about. In a novel that purports to be 'adult', it's bizarre how none of these adult characters ever consciously recognise or consider that they could be 'in love with' or even 'attracted to' someone - such things are always couched in vague language about 'feelings they can't identify'.

Kel fancies his childhood friend Antonetta, who doesn't get a POV but seems to have some kind of feelings for both Kel and Prince Conor (and Kel when he's impersonating Conor), but Kel also has fond memories of the prostitute Silla (a character who serves no purpose other than to be a prop for virtue-signalling about sex work being real work, in a strange subplot about

a rape victim who girlbosses her way into becoming the madam of a brothel),

who also sleeps with Conor, who catches an instalove/hate attraction to Lin (because they are

the reincarnations of fantasy King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba???).

This plot where the 'reincarnation' of the deified historical figures are revealed to be one of the main characters is shockingly similar to Hannah Whitten's Foxglove King, though I assume this must be coincidence as both books were probably written concurrently. In any case, the historical story being told through the chapter epigraphs is far and away more interesting than the main plot happening in the present.

The worldbuilding is paper-thin and the setting (an ersatz Renaissance-era Venice which seems to be an homage to Ellen Kushner's vastly superior Riverside) extends exactly as far as the immediate needs of the plot require, and no farther. Certain proper nouns are barely altered from the real-world equivalents (Ashkenazi --> Ashkar), which is probably intended to lend the story some historical gravitas, but really just comes off as shallow and lazy.

The prose is serviceable but nothing special, but Clare treats the reader like a fool - she constantly indulges in an absolutely infuriating and immersion-destroying habit of using a literary device, and then immediately afterwards having the POV character's internal monologue tell the audience about the use of the device, just to make absolutely certain we didn't miss what a clever author she is (e.g. in an early chapter, the prince injures his hand; later, Kel injures his hand, and he is sure to tell us how spooky it is that they've suffered the same injury. Gosh you guys, it's almost like the blurred line  between their identities has become physically manifest through a parallel scene!).

The story is firmly in bildungsroman territory (Kel spends a lot of words angsting about the lost halcyon days of playing pirates with his childhood friends; Lin has her first attractions and kisses), but this is a rare (pseudo-)YA novel which is at least attempting to have a theme beyond the generic hero's journey tropes about 'finding your inner power' and rebelling against evil invaders/governments/religions/whatever. The theme is the nature of personal identity, and the narrative seems to be interested in exploring the tension between self-perception and the perception of others, and the ways that identity can be suppressed, subsumed, compromised, replaced, transformed (Kel is an orphan of completely unknown provenance, who is raised in the palace as the prince's cousin and secret body-double; the ruler of the criminal underworld is the mysterious Ragpicker King, which turns out to be a title that is passed down between men who forsake their former identities; at the end of the novel

Lin publicly declares herself to be the reincarnation of the Goddess, to give hope to a terminally ill friend - although presented as a conscious deception, her agency in this declaration is undermined by the fact that she has gained magical powers from an artifact of the goddess, and has been experiencing flashbacks of the goddess' past life, so all signs indicate that she <i>is</i> the reincarnation, but not bright enough to figure it out).

Unfortunately this book only serves to introduce the characters, plot and setting, with no 'pay-offs' to speak of, so nothing interesting is said about this theme; for now, it merely exists.

By far the best character in the whole thing was the big-sisterly bodyguard of the French fantasy-French princess,

but she was far too cool to live.

 Welp, this is Reylo fanfic, so inevitably it meets that most basic benchmark level of ‘acceptable’, but I must say I have never been so bored by a 500 year old wizard in my life.

Ali Hazelwood has two cover quotes (bravo for Berkley knowing their audience) and both of them are bullshit:

As is usually the case in contemporary romances, they aren’t “enemies”. There was at least one occasion when Reggie directly informs the reader that she and Ben are “supposed to be enemies” and it jolted me out of the story because I never felt it was so. As usual, all of their “enmity” was caused by misunderstandings and miscommunications, the effect of which are diluted even further by the fact that Ben has his own POV chapters, to ensure that readers with weak constitutions know that he would never harm Reggie and she is never in even the slightest bit of actual danger with him. 

Their “love” is as superficial and unearned as their “enmity” - notably, the book’s indulgence in typical obnoxious sex-positive millennial feminism devolves into a total farce at the post-makeover “ballroom” scene (you know the trope) when, without a shred of self-awareness, Reggie exposits her disgust at all the (physically) old men being escorted by beautiful submissive young women - but of course, her 500 year old boyfriend is the perfect man. Since she knows nothing about the personalities of these men other than vague rumours about The Patriarchy (and keeping in mind that she was previously told that Ben himself was a Bad Man who had done Bad Things, but he turned out to be just misunderstood after all) the only reasonable conclusion one can draw is that Ben is a better boyfriend than all these other old wizards because, despite being centuries her senior, he’s still hot. 

The sex scenes were boring and mechanical and totally unnecessary for the plot and character development, and one of them was the most laughably random and unexpected sex scene in any of these romcoms I’ve read so far

where Reggie and Ben give each other hand jobs while they are trapped in a well,

in a sort of bizarre parody of Rey’s (mostly scrapped) sexual awakening in the yonic mirror-cave in TLJ. 

The worldbuilding (such as it is) in this book is awful, even by typical fantasy-romance standards. Witches and warlocks perform spells by praying to the ancient Roman gods, and inscribing curses on tablets. Great! What about the gods of every other culture that ever existed on Earth? Who knows? No other cultures are ever even mentioned. 

Generally it has that very superficial and totally unresearched style I have come to expect from this genre, which is evident from the minor details which should make the reader feel immersed in the world and familiar with the characters. Ben wears a “favourite designer suit”, as if that tells us anything at all about him. Which designer? Cut? Colour? Reggie also describes the suit as looking uncomfortable, which betrays a total lack of understanding about the history of menswear on the part of the author. 

Reggie has not one, but two Special Protagonist Traits that makes her unlike the other girls - the first is that she has OCD (which is treated as an adorable quirk and given no serious concern whatsoever), and the second is that she plays legally-distinct Magic: The Gathering. This is pretty cool and relatable (as opposed to the Special Protagonist Trait in the last book I read - Forget Me Not by Julie Soto - where the main character effortlessly maintains a rockin’ bod despite being troublingly addicted to donuts). I’m willing to believe that Clare has some level of real-life experience with the game, and it had a lot of potential to be used as a vehicle for literary techniques to enhance the story - for example, by depicting Reggie and Ben as metaphorical enemy duelists in the context of the game, due to their competitive natures. Unfortunately Spellcraft: the Magicking is another element of the book which is terminally underdeveloped. Reggie’s ace card is the Brilliant Sun-Phoenix (sun symbolism, divine light, rebirth, you know the drill) but we don’t even see her win a game with it! 

The utter lack of curiosity in both this main character and this author is astounding. It baffles me that Clare has enough of an academic bent to research ancient Roman curse magic for fun, and yet somehow this is the most interesting way she could come up with to incorporate that into a novel. If I actually became friends/lovers with a 500 year old person, I would need to hear all of the stories. I would never stop asking questions about the history of magic and the history of the world, but Reggie never asks or wonders about anything, and the age difference is only ever really "explored“ (in the most superficial sense of the term) in relation to the question of whether Ben thinks Reggie is too young for him, which itself is mostly treated as a question of pure numbers rather than lived emotional experience. Possibly this is because Ben seems to have had vanishingly few memorable or emotional experiences during all that time. He has exactly two significant sources of trauma - one being his neglectful parents (of course),

whom he murdered himself,

a fact which is dropped on the reader in the most ridiculous manner and moment, and the other being a far less detailed and compelling version of Lipwig’s realisation in Going Postal (that ”victimless“ scams against greedy capitalist exploiters still lead to consequences that destroy the lives of good people trapped in the capitalist system).

As mediocre as this first book was, it can probably only go up from here, and the sequel is GingeRose fic - the most criminally underrated ship in all of Star Wars - so maybe this will turn out to have been worth it after all.  

I have the same complaints about presentation as for the first book, however this one has the etymology and meanings of some of the proper nouns in the pronunciation guide, which is great.  Unfortunately I was unable to maintain this optimism about the actual narrative. 

Generally every aspect of this book (plot, characters and setting) is more original than Book 1, due to no longer being so tightly shackled to the inspirational source material of AtLA and ACOTAR (and to a lesser extent, ASOIAF and Shadow and Bone). 

The idea of this book is great - dead or missing mothers are one of the most ubiquitous tropes in fantasy, and it's quite rare for the mother to be given any sort of complex characterisation or history. Particularly in the case of male heroes, the dead/absent mother is usually written as an archetypal, perfectly idealised goddess-figure for the hero to mourn and/or avenge. The mother's suffering at the hands of Men might also be used as the motivation for the hero to declare himself a feminist in a traditionally chauvinist culture (or more transparently, as an excuse to allow author to write the love interest as a feminist, thus making him dreamy). 

In the first book, our hero Kell was modeled after Zuko (yay) and Rhysand (boo, hiss), both of whom had mothers who were sacrificed by the writers at the altar of male protagonist man-pain.  I only made it 2 books into ACOTAR, but I remember thinking in the second book that Rhysand's mother was given an unusual amount of attention in the Illyrian backstory infodump and I expected to hear more about her experiences later in the story, but I am told this doesn't happen. Zuko's mother is believed to be dead until about halfway through the final season, and after she is revealed to be (possibly) alive, nothing more comes of it and this revelation doesn't have any strong influence on Zuko's characterisation in any subsequent episode (we do not acknowledge the AtLA comics in this house). 

So this idea of writing a full-length sequel/prequel where the former protagonist's absent mother is the main character is neat. Moreover, Annick is a Bad Mother who hates her eldest son for reminding her of his evil father.

Unfortunately, however, writing believable ancient immortal non-human characters (let alone in first person POV) is very difficult to do, and so 900 year old faerie queen Annick might have been an overly ambitious protagonist for a relatively inexperienced author (Annick is convincingly neither ancient nor inhuman), but Elizabeth did at least succeed in making Annick's narrative voice more mature and worldly than Rosalie's was.

The setting is also beginning to feel very artificial (like a backdrop for a play rather than a fully realised world), as we are two books in and we have learned very, very little about the lives, cultures and beliefs of the common people who inhabit these kingdoms - all of the main characters are royals or royal guards/spies/advisors, and the action rarely strays outside the walls of various castles and palaces. 

Bizarrely, in this novel which is backstory about Kell's conception, the "romance" feels very out of place. "Romance" is in scare quotes because it isn't, really - Annick has lustful sex with the king while she is still grieving the deaths of her former lovers, and then we are told that they are falling in love (and of course they are mates, which is a concept that is given far less explanation and plot-relevance than it is in the SJM-verse, and makes no sense because the king is a human), but they have had hardly any on-page interactions by the time they are “in love”, and most of those interactions are in council meetings. The romance really suffered from not being explored through both POVs, and by the end of the book, I still couldn’t identify any of King Henry’s distinguishing character traits other than his bedroom preferences, which I would prefer to know far less about. Probably the worst indictment I can give this book is that I was not even slightly bothered when Henry died at the end, because I didn't believe in the "love story" in the first place, and now book 3 can (hopefully) have an actually interesting plot about actually interesting characters.