Wayward
I’d heard a lot about this book and almost signed up for the ARC when it was going around. Unfortunately, First Oaths was a pretty disappointing read for me for a variety of reasons from character development to worldbuilding to rampant misogyny to writing style.
For starters, the main characters fell flat, their past traumas not affecting their current personalities ENOUGH. Kit is stoic and dull 85% of the novel while Penny is childish, naive, and stupid. They feel like caricatures of the boring kind I could find in many contemporary MM romances.
Which brings me to another point: THIS DID NOT FEEL LIKE FANTASY.
It seems like the author did a grand total of zero research on what a setting such as this would feel like. Everyone has houses and couches and dishes and furniture and ovens and sinks. They’re hand-pumped sinks, apparently? But, sure, let’s give everyone plumbing and modern conveniences without describing how that’s possible in this setting. Aside from no one having phones or cars, this story could have almost just as easily been supplanted to modern day. No one even rides a horse in this book. It’s like nothing that would require research was delved into. Unfortunately, that left the setting shallow and with a painful dearth of “worldbuilding.”
And then there’s, importantly, the fact that not a single female character in this book had agency. Most of them are relegated to cooking and baking for the men. Frankly, First Oaths felt extremely misogynistic to me. The percentage of male characters to female characters was dramatically skewed to the men. Off the top of my head, I can think of twelve named male characters and five named female characters. One of the women has no lines. Three of them cook and bake for the men. And the last one was extremely gullible and ignorantly trusting, so. She wasn’t a shining example of feminism either. Whereas the men are the main characters, the ones in charge, or the ones with respectable jobs and some level of power outside of “baking.” I kept hoping one of the women would turn out to have more depth than she at first appeared, but none of them portrayed anything much beyond surface level “feminine” positivity. Which was just bad character building on top of the misogyny.
There are other matters, like the plot being painfully slow and dull or the alternating POV style falling into the hole of re-describing everything that happened from the previous chapter at each POV swap, meaning I could have basically skipped the first couple of “summary” paragraphs every chapter about two-thirds way through the book onwards. But with all of this I’ve described, more I haven’t, and the painfully simplistic, boring writing style to top it off, two stars is generous from me. I honestly hate being harsh to indies, but this feels like the bare bones of a story. In my opinion, First Oaths needed a few re-writes to reach a level of solid storytelling.
I’d heard a lot about this book and almost signed up for the ARC when it was going around. Unfortunately, First Oaths was a pretty disappointing read for me for a variety of reasons from character development to worldbuilding to rampant misogyny to writing style.
For starters, the main characters fell flat, their past traumas not affecting their current personalities ENOUGH. Kit is stoic and dull 85% of the novel while Penny is childish, naive, and stupid. They feel like caricatures of the boring kind I could find in many contemporary MM romances.
Which brings me to another point: THIS DID NOT FEEL LIKE FANTASY.
It seems like the author did a grand total of zero research on what a setting such as this would feel like. Everyone has houses and couches and dishes and furniture and ovens and sinks. They’re hand-pumped sinks, apparently? But, sure, let’s give everyone plumbing and modern conveniences without describing how that’s possible in this setting. Aside from no one having phones or cars, this story could have almost just as easily been supplanted to modern day. No one even rides a horse in this book. It’s like nothing that would require research was delved into. Unfortunately, that left the setting shallow and with a painful dearth of “worldbuilding.”
And then there’s, importantly, the fact that not a single female character in this book had agency. Most of them are relegated to cooking and baking for the men. Frankly, First Oaths felt extremely misogynistic to me. The percentage of male characters to female characters was dramatically skewed to the men. Off the top of my head, I can think of twelve named male characters and five named female characters. One of the women has no lines. Three of them cook and bake for the men. And the last one was extremely gullible and ignorantly trusting, so. She wasn’t a shining example of feminism either. Whereas the men are the main characters, the ones in charge, or the ones with respectable jobs and some level of power outside of “baking.” I kept hoping one of the women would turn out to have more depth than she at first appeared, but none of them portrayed anything much beyond surface level “feminine” positivity. Which was just bad character building on top of the misogyny.
There are other matters, like the plot being painfully slow and dull or the alternating POV style falling into the hole of re-describing everything that happened from the previous chapter at each POV swap, meaning I could have basically skipped the first couple of “summary” paragraphs every chapter about two-thirds way through the book onwards. But with all of this I’ve described, more I haven’t, and the painfully simplistic, boring writing style to top it off, two stars is generous from me. I honestly hate being harsh to indies, but this feels like the bare bones of a story. In my opinion, First Oaths needed a few re-writes to reach a level of solid storytelling.