Kat

Time-travel madness maybe romance? Sign me the hell up, I thought after reading the synopsis. To say this book disappointed me might be the understatement of the year and it's only February!
The romance is a real ouroboros. There's much to admire about this ancient symbol, but it's not what I want in a romance. Eleanor and Robin like each other because they like each other because it has been said that they like each other. This might have been acceptable except this is supposed to be the engine of the story, and I didn't particularly care.

Half formed plot lines that I was far more curious about that the Eleanor/Robin romance are sprinkled through the book, but unfortunately our lurching through the timeline means they're often lost (Aunt Clara's dealing with the difficulties on the restrictions that came with being female) or resolved in a timeline where the resolutions are kind of uninteresting (Catherine's elopement with David. I don't want to see that resolution in Vietnam era America where the worst thing that happens are hurt feelings and Lady Ann getting to say I told you so.)

The Reveal.
A number of reviewers said this part of the novel of confusing or overly complicated, but I think Krueger actually did a good job laying it all out clearly.This was my favorite part of the novel, and if I had actually any of the slightest attachment to any of the characters I probably would have gotten choked up reading about Eleanor pleading for her life and her loved ones. Unfortunately I don't, so I was mostly left saying "wow this really could have been something." Like the rest of the novel.

I did like Krueger's writing for the most part though. The sole exception being whenever Elizabeth would show up and for some reason she'd forget every bit of vocabulary and the page would be filled with endless permutations of ‘burble.' (Brits, is this one of those British/Queen's English words that is much more popular over there than in America? Anyway hate it. It's going on my least favorite word list along with moist and giblets.)

Setting: a fancy restaurant
At Rise: a Woman sits trying to catch the attention of a well dressed waiter without being too demanding or rude

WAITER
Yes, Madame, how can I help you?

WOMAN
I just—I think there's been a mistake. You see, I ordered Wicked Saints, and I received . . . this.
[gestures to the book with obvious distaste]

WAITER
As you can see, Madame, it says Wicked Saints right there on the cover.

WOMAN
I know. I know! It's just—it was described as “devastatingly Gothic?” And—just, there's no transgression against the natural order, let alone a price to pay for it. No subversion of the romantic paradigm? There's no Edenic state of bliss to return to! Where's the atonement? Maybe you could say Nadya has forbidden knowledge being able to talk to all the gods, but that's just a thing she can do. There's no price for any of this. Do you see what I'm saying? And if these are what passing for Byronic heroes, these days, well, I shudder to think of the state of poor Lord Byron's corpse.

WAITER
I'm sorry it did not meet madame's expectations.

WOMAN
It's hardly your fault that the copywriter apparently confused Gothic with Slavic. Although the wordbuilding is so slapdash that it seems quite the insult to say so. The Slavic countries have such a wonderful rich history and are so often ignored by the fantasy genre. It's such a shame that this is the representation they get. Shaking a few Eastern European names over a generic, underdeveloped fantasy land doesn't really season the pierogi—if you will excuse my turn of phrase.

WAITER
Of course, madame.


WOMAN
And now there's an underdeveloped romance, and the female lead loses all her agency as soon as the love interest shows up. And I just—it's too much. I can't do it.

WAITER
You have our deepest apologies. Allow me to remove this and to fetch a menu so that you may choose something more to your taste.

WOMAN
Oh. Thank you. That would be wonderful.

[b:The Guinevere Deception 43568394 The Guinevere Deception (Camelot Rising, #1) Kiersten White https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551892183l/43568394.SY75.jpg 67787916] was an odd book for me. I'm sure if you watch my star rating, it'll flip back and forth between two and three several times before I actually settle on one. And then probably see it on my book list and change it a few more times. So, look, it's a solid 2.5. Rounding up or down is absolutely pointless. This book is heavy on mystery and low on plot. Guinevere isn't the real Guinevere, but a changeling witch sent by Merlin to protect King Arthur and Camelot. Is there a real Guinevere? How does she feel about this? What happened to her? What are the ethical implications of swapping one woman for another woman to pretending to be the first woman? I mean, that's more than a little troubling right? What is Guinevere supposed to protect Arthur from? I hope you weren't hoping for answers, reader. There are none to be had. Mostly Guinevere talks and runs into other famous Arthurian characters and has pretty boring conversations with them. It feels like White is taking you a meandering one note tour and hoping that occasionally running into an old friend here and there is enough to keep you interested. Oh, there's Sir Bors! Isn't he always a delight to see? etc. etc. It's not enough. Here I will admit that I kind of hated most of White's choices with the Arthur's mythos. Arthur is supposed to start the new age of man, which means getting rid of all the magic, but his right hand man is a sorcerer and his wife is secretly a witch. So a bit hypocritical. But mostly turning fairy tale Camelot into low fantasy world is kind of a bummer. Mordred gets made over into a hunky antivillian who has a brief fling with Guinevere, instead of Lancelot who gets a surprise gender reveal as female, but wait no, trans? nonbinary? IDK. They only show up for a hot minute anyway. Most importantly, where is my boy Gawain aka best knight?Still! I know that Arthurian canon is pretty much a choose your own adventure story, and while it was not personally to my taste, I was willing to at least go with it, or would have been had you know anything of interest happened. Guinevere makes no political maneuverings and spends so much time separated from her husband that the very premise of the story (changeling witch bodyguard) starts to look shaky. The last forty pages is pretty good, but it was way too little way too late.

We're dropped off immediately into a Prologue. Prologues are just so hard to take seriously even in the best circumstances, and this is certainly not the best circumstances. This is a flash-forward, the worst kind of prologue. If this is the interesting stuff, why are you making me start thousands of words—and in this case several years—earlier?

It was hard to get into. The writing much too much for my tastes. It keeps dropping big Emotional revelations on you, but you don't know what's really going on or these characters or why you should give a fork. So while these big Emotional nuances are being flung towards you like anvils, they land more like a gentle spritz of face spray with a partially blocked nozzle.

Still, I was ready to hum along and to give this book a chance. But it didn't take long for the book to again completely stall me in my tracks. I can't have actually read that line. It cannot actually say what I though it said. Maybe ADHD-brain got to me? So I backtracked and reread this gem several times to make sure neither eyes nor brain was fooling around.



Nope. It actually said that.

The girl who had promised to love him for a thousand days.

Now, dear reader, I could not stop my mental calculator from popping open and running some basic long division. A thousand days is slightly over two and a half years. Ah, two and a half years of devotion? How does one get so lucky?

Who can forget the famous balcony scene where Romeo and Juliet are at last together, and their words to each other form a sonnet where they swear their hearts' allegiance for the next two and a half years? Or that time Captain Wentworth mourned his loss of engagement to Anne Elliot for two and a half years and then got over it and then never thought of her again? Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were so devoted to each other for those two and a half years.

The amount of it takes to have a toddler capable of potty training, about the length of time Anne Bolyen was Queen of England.

Two and a half years.

If it seems that I am harping unduly this, know that 1) it's because I am genuinely delighted by it and teasing out all possible implications of this could entertain me for days, and far more importantly 2) it's kind of the perfect microcosm of this book's problems: While some of it might seem fine even beautiful on the surface, more than ten seconds of thought about it, and you realize that it's nonsense.

The world building is shallow. The north is full of nobles and kings who have colonized the eastern countries, and then there's the south which has brown people and nothing to really do with the other two regions politically? In fact, the south seems to exist only for (deep sigh) the representation points.

(Also not sure how I feel about taking one of the largest and persistent problems faced mostly by poc and giving it to white people. I'm going with just feels kind of icky for right now.)

One of our leads, Aurelia is of color(?), but other than a brief lament that this means she doesn't conform to the court's beauty standards, it doesn't mean anything. She could have been white and nothing would have changed. Look, I don't want characters of color to be constantly faced with racism, prejudice, or microaggressions, but this feels hollow, like slapping tanner on white skin.

(Don't worry! Hathaway still manages to shoehorn some gross brown people tropes into the text though. Havish is sexually promiscuous! And it's hard not to read him as sexually predatory given the large age difference between the two of them. Queen Sinora was illiterate but had an innate cunning! Man, all them brownies do love sneaking around and being backstabby and underhanded! They are just so good at it!)


In the same vein, you learn one of Athan's brothers is gay, but this isn't given any nuance or thought. How are gay people treated in world? Is his sexuality a well known fact? Is it surprising that Athan knows this about his brother? At one point, Athan's other brother—the aggressively heterosexual one—asks if Athan prefers boys too. How am I supposed to take this? Is that a legitimate question? Is he being a dick? Is he consciously tapping into years old and systemically embedded prejudice to be a dick?

I don't know because Hathaway doesn't bother to fill in any of these details. Or for any other social issue. The East is stuck in an endless war, so why isn't it sending women? Do women have the vote? Do people of color? For that matter, do I even know if white men can vote?

¯_(ツ)_/¯ says the text.

I might be able to excuse this somewhat if it was broad in scope, but the world doesn't just feel small. It's downright claustrophobic. Athan dreams of running away to be free of the never ending war machine that his home has turned into. He dreams not of running away to lay on the beaches of Fantasy-Fiji or of being a sheep-herder in fantasy-Iceland but of hiding in the mountains that are about three inches away from his home on the map.

Of course, this could also be because Athan is the most unimaginative sort of dullard. He wouldn't even be the only one to grace these pages.

It's not his fault. No one in this book has the sort of personality that you could dive into without worrying about breaking your neck, and Athan was the one that held my attention for the longest. I was interested to see how he went from trying to escape to becoming a commander, but it turns out he has no real arc. As soon as his mother dies, he steps up to play ball.

As for our female lead, Aurelia is a spoiled princess, and we've all seen this before. Normally, I like spoiled princesses. Watching them develop into interesting nuanced characters is a good time, but Aurelia is the most boring and most static version of this trope that I have seen in ages. Eventually, she becomes an impressive sniper at least according to the prologue, but Hathaway planted absolutely no seeds for that in this book. Her eagle eye is solely devoted to noticing her best friend's breasts. (This happened so often that I began to wonder if it was foreshadowing for a bi reveal. It wasn't naturally, but it was something almost interesting about her for a while.)

With our two leads being fairly lackluster, the rest of the cast fares a little better. All the bad characters are two steps away from twirling their mustaches and cackling. For example, Aurelia's uncle is Mean and Bad because he hunts and trains his dogs to tear little fawns to shreds because, sure, that's definitely how hunting works. While General Dakar and his devotion to the revolution is of course abusive towards his sons and drives his wife to drink. The most interesting of the lot are Queen Sinora, Aurelia's mother, former ace sniper, eastern alley, southern expat, turned northern ruler. In a just world, this would be her story but we're stuck with her drip of a daughter instead. Alas. Cyar, Athan's best friend, is also a bright spot. His friendship really helps to bring out the best of Athan's character, and their interactions are some of the best sections of the book although I could not exactly divine the reason as to why he has ended up in the Eastern army and fighting a war that wasn't even his. (Cyar, if you're being held captive against your will, blink twice, okay?)


Plotwise, nothing happens. Our two leads don't meet until—what? Sixty percent of the way through, and they pretty much immediately fall for each other, and then some more nothing happens, and the book ends.

All in all, it felt like I read the overly long prologue to a more interesting novel.

nothing particularly spectacular or innovative in this satire. your usual too reliant on technology, enviromental dystopia. Skip.