Won from First Reads!

Basic Plot: Everyone thinks Kere (aka Darling Cruel), heir to the Caronese Empire is gay, but his girlfriend Zarya would beg to differ. They have to go through a lot to be together including but not limited to: surviving torture and imprisonment as well as starting a war with the League.

This was a monster of a book for a romance at 614 pages. That's a monster of a book for just about any genre except epic fantasy, come to think of it. It's hard to quantify my feelings about this book, so I'll try to sum up my thoughts as best I can and hope they come out coherent.

As I've never read a League book before, I had no preconceived notions going into it, which I understand was something of an issue for fans of the series. The only preconception I had was that it was a romance, which always makes me extremely cautious. I was actually very put off my the book after the.. erm... unusual... manner of exposition used in this book. But I learned a new word because of it: "sexposition." And it has nothing to do with the Kama Sutra. Who knew?

This actually brings me to my biggest gripes about this book, which don't actually include the sex, which was absurdly frequent but not to the point of losing narrative focus, thank the gods. The first gripe is that the book is probably half flashback. Every time a scene would get moving, someone would have to have a flashback to their youth and all of the TRAUMA that just oozed out of the characters. It felt like torture porn at times. HONESTLY, how much abuse must an author heap upon the male lead of a romance novel? Over the top and overdone, Ms. Kenyon. By halfway through the book it had started to irritate me. By the end, I wanted to slap her into a cohesive timeline.

Which actually leads me to my second gripe: the characters were at times out and out STUPID. Darling in particular. There were times when I just found myself tossed completely out of my willing suspension of disbelief by the way the characters acted, were treated, or managed to endure. I call shenanigans. SHENANIGANS!

That said, it really wasn't a terrible book. It wasn't what I'd call "literature," but it was enjoyable enough of a read that I felt invested in the characters and their relationship. This varied in strength over the course of the book (probably in direct correlation with the number of flashbacks I had to endure). The book was sci fi, but no hard science went into this, and the setting was just the location for the story, not a difficult to interpret web of technological descriptions. For this, I was supremely thankful. There was an actual plot, even if it was overly drawn out and angsty, and the plot did seem to trump the sex scenes in importance to the author, at least most of the time.

I don't know if I'll actively seek out more books by this author, but it was a decent read, and I'm glad I had the chance to find out what Kenyon's books are like. I like to be at least somewhat aware of the popular authors in my favorite genres.