Freshly enlisted in the Highland Regiment, he does all he can to steer clear of responsibility and commitment. Just not his cup of mead, that. Loose of tongue and even looser of morals, he rarely misses an opportunity to get into trouble—and into the other archers’ knickers, too.
In a unit composed almost entirely of Dark Elves, Hernan Seinnés, with his green eyes and auburn hair, is an outsider. When Verhan, up the creek again, is blackmailed into helping Hernan, he never expects to fall for him. But during the long hours spent training Hernan for the Honour Guard, feelings strike the Highlander right in the heart—and with the force of an arrow.
Unversed in relationships, Verhan finally plucks up enough courage to tell Hernan how he feels, only to drive the Asirhwӱnian away instead. If Verhan can swallow his pride, he might get one last chance to show Hernan what he means to him—and maybe this time he can hit the mark.
I had this marked as READ in my Calibre file, but hadn’t written a review for it. Which left me in an uncertain space. Had I read it? Yes…no…maybe. In the end, I decided to either read it or re-read it. And I’m glad I did. I so love Bacon’s use of feels, sarcasm, and characterization. But so many of her works are too short for me. (Just a personal preference kind of thing.) This is a bit longer, but still full of all the character, feeling, and wit I adore in her shorter works. (In fact, it’s longer, so it has more even.) I’m so happy to have read it…for the first time or not.
A nation born of angels, vast and intricate and surrounded by danger… a woman born to servitude, unknowingly given access to the secrets of the realm…
Born with a scarlet mote in her left eye, Phédre nó Delaunay is sold into indentured servitude as a child. When her bond is purchased by an enigmatic nobleman, she is trained in history, theology, politics, foreign languages, the arts of pleasure. And above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Exquisite courtesan, talented spy… and unlikely heroine. But when Phédre stumbles upon a plot that threatens her homeland, Terre d’Ange, she has no choice.
Betrayed into captivity in the barbarous northland of Skaldia and accompanied only by a disdainful young warrior-priest, Phédre makes a harrowing escape and an even more harrowing journey to return to her people and deliver a warning of the impending invasion. And that proves only the first step in a quest that will take her to the edge of despair and beyond.
Phédre nó Delaunay is the woman who holds the keys to her realm’s deadly secrets, and whose courage will decide the very future of her world.
Books often get lost in my TBR, especially ebooks. That’s what happens when you own a ridiculous number of them. That’s also how I’ve owned a copy of this book since 2017 and basically forgotten about it, or about owning it. Because I’ve seen it on the library shelf several times and passed it up (not realizing I had a copy at home). I gave it a pass because the blurb made me think the story would be really seedy and I just wasn’t up for immersing myself in that.
Then it happened that I stumbled across a Best of Fantasy Romance list that included Kusiel’s Dart. The thing about this list was that I’d read 4 of the 13 books on it and didn’t think any of them were best-of worthy. (1 I flat out disliked.) So, I decided to read the remaining 9 books, over the next few months, and see how I feel about the list, as a whole, once I’d read them all. And in investigating them, I rediscovered that I own this book. So, I started here.
On a humorous side note, since I have an ecopy and didn’t think to check the page count on Amazon or GR, I didn’t realize I was leaping into a 1,000 page epic. Surprise! (I think that if this book was published today, instead of almost 20 years ago, the publishers would have broken it into several books. I’m glad they didn’t though.)
In a bit of a petty huff, I have to admit that I liked it a lot. (I still don’t know if I’d call it best-of material, but it’s certainly closer than the others on the list that I’d read.) The world building here is wide and deep. The politics intricate and complicated. I admit I occasionally got lost in who’s who and what’s what. But it is wonderfully complex and diverse. I laughed, I cried, I rooted for the underdogs, and I appreciated the variety of love and friendship on display throughout the book.
To address my fear of seediness, it wasn’t. There was sex in the book, but I would almost say there wasn’t a single sex scene, as I would normally think of them. Never did I feel sex was used erotically. It was there, but the point wasn’t to titillate. If anything, her masochism—not that the words sadist or masochist were used in the book—was far FAR more prominent. And while I agree it had use to the story and plot, I still can’t help sneering a bit at anything that glorifies women’s sexual suffering (just not my thing). But I was gratified to find that role of sadist was filled by both men and women. So, there wasn’t the strict man = abuser, women = victim correlation some such themes are reducible to.
I imagine I’ll continue the series at some point. But I’m not leaping into book two just yet. I’ve got too many other commitments to dedicate myself to another epic just now.
Earlier today, I stumbled across the 13 Best Fantasy Romance Books of All Time post (even updated for 2021, apparently). Now, this wasn’t a random blogger’s opinion of what qualifies as the best fantasy romance books. Instead, Most Recommended Books took a survey of other best-of lists and condensed them into one. (I think this is their shtick, what they do, essentially. And I’m not taking issue with it.)
Here’s their method in their words:
Our goal was to create the best list of Fantasy Romance books on the internet.
To remain objective and unbiased, we looked at the 5 most popular “best Fantasy Romance books” articles online (we chose 5 because anything more than that diluted our quality).
Our rationale was simple: If a book only appears in one article, it’s probably just the journalist’s opinion, but if it appears in two or more, it’s probably worth checking out!
And all of that would have been fine, except that of the 13 (what an odd number of choices, btw), I’d read 4 (and own one more that I’ve not read yet). 4! I’m a 200-300 books a year reader, mostly in the Fantasy/fantasy romance genres, and I’d read 4 of what they deemed the best of fantasy romance. What’s more, of those 4, 1 I basically hated, and the other 3 were passable, in my opinion. Not rave-about-them bad, but not best-of material either. So, I was a bit shaken by this list.
I realize that my tastes don’t always align with other readers’. And many of the books on the list have been quite popular. I also acknowledge that several of them are Young Adult, and I’ve become increasingly picky in which YA books I read because, at 44, I’ve outgrown enjoying a lot of the angst many of them center on. But still, I was intrigued in a horrified sort of way; wondering what the rest of the books might be like if my opinion of the 4 I’ve read so was vastly different from others’.
If you’re curious, here are my reviews of the 4 I’ve read.
What makes this a challenge, instead of just a generalized post, is that I’m going to make a concerted effort to read the other nine books on the list. It’s too late in the year to think I’ll finish this challenge before the new year. So, I’m not putting any sort of time frame on this. It’s pretty open. But I’m going to prioritize reading these whenever I’m not focusing on something else. We’ll see if I agree any more once I’ve read the rest of the list.
