Kait

As a fantasy story, I think this sorely underdelivered. There are two countries, about which we get no background or cultural information at all. For a lot of the book, that's all we know. We don't even get any background information about our MCs. What was Damen's relationship with his brother like before? Was their mother ever around? Did he have any supporters in Akielos?

We do get a lot of information about the Veretian Court, and that's all. We are told what the slaves wear, how they should act, and their expectations. How did Vere come to this cultural norm? We don't know. We do learn about naked wrestling where the loser is forcibly penetrated, so… that's something.

This book was short, and I'm well aware that this whole setting and idea is window dressing for non-con and bondage. It could've been expanded into something more with just a little more effort. I'm going to use Kushiel's Dart as an example, even though I really didn't like that book either. But it was kind of the same idea but a little more powerful and thematic and without the pervasive humiliation kink.

I found Laurent to be uninteresting. He's hyped up as this bad dude, but he doesn't really do anything the whole time. Yeah he gets Damen flogged but he immediately gets his comeuppance for that. This dilemma that the book informs us about where Laurent needs to treat Damen well to ensure the continuation of the peace treaty is dumb. Why would one country give another country a slave only to expect them not to be treated like property?

I got sick of Damen because he acted really stupid. Did he do any schooling or foreign training as the future King? He's acting like he knows nothing about politics, foreign policy, or common sense throughout the book. I also didn't get a good sense of his personality aside from “violent”. I guess that's to be expected at a certain point when you're in his situation, but it came across as bad writing rather than intentional.

I did think some of the sex scenes were hot. The non-con BJ scene was pretty good. A lot of it was there for shock value, and I really don't get why the choice was made for Nicaise to be so young. This didn't really do it for me as a romance though. It's pretty explicitly not romantic. There's some sexual chemistry there between Laurent and Damen I guess but not enough to make up for the stuff I didn't like.

I'm definitely going to pass on continuing. These hyper-sexual books don't really do it for me, and this one doesn't have enough plot, theming, or technical writing skill to get me to keep going. I know that these books started as a webseries, and that at the time it was written it was different and groundbreaking. I have respect for CS Pascat and what they've made, I just don't think the story suits me, personally.

I thought this was a really fun story.

I'm not someone who generally reads contemporary romance, so I was kind of surprised how Goldbeck made me feel entertained and just invested enough to really enjoy myself.

I am not from New York, but I am from New Jersey pretty close to New York. I think this made it fun enough for all the references to the very New York places and mannerisms without picking them apart too closely, kind of like Manhattan is my weird cousin I only talk to on birthdays and holidays. This made it very fun for me, I love sort of knowing the in-jokes and I never get that when a story is set in LA.

I think Ari and Josh were great main characters for this type of story. They're both messy and very imperfect, but I think extremely well-adjusted people don't end up in a friend with benefits type situation.

Sometimes I find that too much texting feels choppy and breaks up the pacing of the book, but I liked that Goldbeck also included group texts. There was a scene where Josh was texting Ari while they were in the same subway car and I thought that was pretty well done.

I think, while I didn't like any of the characters, they all existed in the world believably and I was satisfied with their journeys. I think Josh and Ari confronted most of their hangups by the end and grew without completely giving up their identities as characters. The romance between Ari and Josh was mostly just okay, but I did like their banter. Goldberg was really good at putting them in funny or awkward situations that made me root for them to get out on the other side of it together.

The one thing I really disliked as it went on was Ari's fear of committing to Josh because she worried it would ruin their friendship. Their friendship was already irreversible damaged by their mutual crush before they even slept together, and I would've preferred for Ari to handle that a little more before actually doing it with him. Also, it felt to me like Josh kind of pestered her into sleeping with him. It seemed like she felt very pressured, both the first time and the morning after, into having sex with him. I didn't love that. The narration and the characters’ dialogue and thoughts made this better, but it still wasn't great.

Also, Goldbeck did this weird thing where she kept switching POVs without making it clear. One second we're seeing Ari’s thoughts, then we're getting a lot of information about why Josh did something, now we're back with Ari. This didn't annoy me as much as it has in the past with other books, but it still wasn't great writing.

Overall I liked this, I don't think it was anything astounding but I had fun reading it. It felt somehow comforting and familiar and it was a nice, easy, and silly read that didn't veer into too silly territory. The fact that this is Goldberg's debut book is impressive.

I started out really liking this. In a post-covid world, I think it's really interesting to re-examine something like this. Then once it stopped being the logistics of how people would initially respond to an epidemic and started being a survival story, it went very sharply downhill.

Let's address some things: I think this is pretty mired in ableism. Would society collapse if everyone went blind? Probably a bit. But blind people have been around for a very long time, and I'm really wondering if Jose Saramago did research with blind people advising him. He even states at one point, “Blindness is also this: to live in a world where all hope is gone.” I think there is a way to write about the pain and struggle of losing one of the senses without being so damn bleak and nihilistic.

There is also a lot of misogyny. The book was permeated with direct or indirect ways women were used or mistreated. Women are exclusively portrayed as wives, caretakers, or whores, sometimes in combination with each other. I almost had to stop reading during this plot where the women were taken for sex. Jose Saramago wrote this in a lot of detail and I really wanted to stop reading at this point. I really got annoyed when Saramago narratively pat himself on the back for making the glasses-wearing woman character, who he continually refers to as the GIRL in dark glasses so I thought she was a minor at first, concerned about her parents. Yes! Women can enjoy noncommittal sex and love their parents. Groundbreaking.

There were some silly things, like a guy dying of a leg infection in like two days. It would take way longer than that. I also think that leaving people in an asylum with no well person to run it is a bit crazy, too. Some people want power more than they are afraid of illness, and a military leader would've fit in here. I didn't see much talk about how the blindness spread, either, or any PPE which certainly existed at the time. Kind of crazy to have your main character be a doctor and write the least medically inquisitive ever.

I'm not sure why Saramago was so fixated on cleanliness and excrement. There are places all over the world where people don't have running water or much and they are able to keep clean. Saramago spent a lot of narrative work destroying individuality and community, which I guess would lead to these problems but I don't think it had to be like this.

He was also fixated on identity, which I know is some socialist thinking that he applied to this society, but it came off ableist as fuck. Does Saramago think blind people don't have a sense of identity? I kind of understood what he was doing with this, but I don't think it worked in this setting. This is a more ungenerous take for me, but I didn't think it fit in with the story.

I don't know if I have different opinions about society than Jose Saramago or what, but I found a lot of the Marxism over the top and unrealistic. This is supposed to be a study of societal breakdown, but somehow, even though there are only three women and basically everyone else on page is male, this book feels more like a study of women, by someone who has never spoken to a woman. Even the woman who has been surviving on her own is a “witch”. Every woman is immediately generalized by the narrative. The scene toward the end where all the ladies are sitting around talking about whether or not they're beautiful was like… so vapid and dumb.

I thought the scene where the wife finds all the creepy shit in the church was pretty cool, it was annoying that we had to hear the thoughts of some kind of writer character instead of exploring that.

Overall I see the exploration of the degradation of society, but this story was so damn patriarchal and misogynist that I couldn’t overlook it to see the bigger commentary on society as a whole. There’s a sequel that, during the first half of the book, I thought I’d want to check out to see the aftermath, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read Jose Saramago’s thoughts on anything else. 2.5 stars, because I thought the first half was really interesting and I really, really hated almost all of everything past the 55% mark or so.

I may have gone into this with too-high expectations, because everything I’ve heard about this book has been people raving about how great it is, but I thought this was just okay.

The magic system is certainly unique, but the fact that we’re told that infected are all killed and there’s none around, and we meet three of them in this book before it’s halfway over makes it seem a little dramatic. I wish we got more information. Where are these cards from? Why are they scattered around? Degeneration also seemed pretty inconsistent. Why isn’t Ravyn degenerating so much? He says he can’t use the cards, but that doesn’t seem equivalent to what Elspeth or Emery went through.

I find that the biggest flaw with this book is that it’s underdeveloped. The world seems thought-through, developed, and intricate, but actually all that we know is that there’s a wood and mist, which is readily available information in the summary. How big is the wood? What’s in it besides the mist? Getting away from the wood, what does the town look like? I didn’t really have a picture, except maybe a vague British medieval town, but the name “Ravyn” kind of ruins that idea. Also, how big is this place? It seems like the only place around, but it can’t be. There are so many families there have to be other villages nearby. The book is fine as it is, if a little empty-feeling, but it could’ve been really immersive and interesting if a little more effort was put in. Also, for a world that has an illness that apparently grants people magical power and probably leads to them getting killed, why is there no name for this besides "the infection"? This started to feel silly the longer it went on. Gillig really should've slapped some kind of name onto this.

I didn’t really like Ravyn. I thought I would, at first, because he had an outside motivation–saving his brother–and was being tricky and manipulative. I didn’t think his magic ability made a lot of sense. He had a line that was like “don’t trust me, I’m dangerous” and I found it to be really cringey. Characters should never say this unless they’re going through some kind of manic episode or trying to scare someone else. Played straight this is a weird thing to say for almost any reason. I wanted to see more of him being a brother and a leader on page, as a love interest I really wasn’t that interested in him.

Elspeth was okay as a protagonist. She wasn’t useless or stupid, but I did feel that she didn’t do much to propel the plot. I think Gillig tends to write more plot-centered stories than character-focused ones, but she’s deceptive about it because her characters deliberate and plot and talk so much that it seems character focused.

There were a lot of characters there in the background, and honestly now that I've finished the book I'd be hard-pressed to tell you much about almost any of them. They were there to either help a little or be antagonistic. I didn't really feel like I got to know anything about them. I don't even think Ravyn or Elspeth really evolved as people during the story at all. They started out with certain goals and needs and at the end of the book they have really the same goals and needs, just more intensely. (I guess Elspeth did evolve as a person but in a way more literal sense than I would've hoped for.)

There was kind of a lot going on in this book. I thought at first that this was going to be a court intrigue/heist plot, but that only lasted for a short while and then it became about Elspeth continually getting herself out of trouble with the monster. This did make the whole theft plot feel a little unsatisfying and rushed. All this stuff together left me feeling like nothing really got its due payoff, we just closed one little plot loop and moved right o to the next thing.

I do think Gillig did a good job building tension. The scene where Elspeth was in the woods hiding, holding a hand over her mouth to keep quiet was really interesting. I actually really liked that whole sequence, with Jespyr in danger and the monster taking over. I did think that the subsequent scenes where she asks the monster for help felt kind of repetitive. I was really kind of let down that the monster Elspeth had been talking to was the Shepherd King. I thought maybe it would be a person who was forced to go into the mist. I also feel like I don’t really understand the consequences of this. I guess he’ll come back, but there has been a bunch of spooky shit happening already so what is his return really going to predicate? (Other than Elspeth getting body snatched or whatever, but I mean what does it mean for the universe.)

I think the end dragged a bit. I didn’t feel any tension at the end because I think once we got to the point that Elspeth’s body was being taken over, it was pretty apparent what was going to happen. I don't even find myself that invested in the solution to all these problems, because I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Overall I wasn’t that impressed with the book, but I will continue. I put the next book on hold on libby and it’s a super long wait so I’ll read it at some point. I’m fine with a wait, I’m not really chomping at the bit to get to the next one. I am a little perplexed about what everyone else really loved about this book, because it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read but I think it was run-of-the-mill quality, with a unique magic-system and world that I don’t find myself appreciating much because it’s not done with enough care, and with below average attention to theming. As a debut book, this is pretty good, and I already see evidence with The Knight and the Moth that Gillig has improved her skills. 3 stars, and I feel like I’m rounding up a little bit.