I Can’t Wait For…Point of Hearts by Melissa Scott
Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.
This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Point of Hearts by Melissa Scott!
Point of Hearts: A Novel of Astreiant by Melissa Scott Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay MC, bisexual MC, M/M
Published on: 20th March 2025
Goodreads
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Secrets and danger stalk the streets of Astreiant…
Point of Hearts, Astreiant’s pleasure district, is being disrupted by an influx of scheming nobles who have descended upon the city for an aristocratic wedding. Mysterious carts smuggling something unknown through the night time streets and civil unrest are creating suspicion and turmoil. Adjunct Point Nicolas Rathe and his lover, Philip Eslingen, captain in the City Guard, are keeping an eye on an aristocrat under self-imposed house arrest when Rathe is injured during a riot. Pursued by false accusations, Eslingen takes him on the run to Point of Knives while they try to unravel a plot against the queen and her government that could destroy the city they love. Can they count on alliances from their pasts to keep them safe long enough to solve the mystery?
NEW ASTREIANT NEW ASTREIANT AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
We were originally told this would be out around December last year, if I remember correctly, BUT I FORGIVE AND FORGET ABOUT ANY DELAY BECAUSE IT’S 240 PAGES AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
(A novella!!! They said it would be a novella!!! IT’S NOT A NOVELLA WE’RE GETTING A WHOLE NEW NOVEL AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!)
So if it’s not obvious, I really, REALLY love the Astreiant series; I’ve been following it since it was with Lethe Press over a decade ago, and have happily purchased the new editions that came out with Queen of Swords press last year, AND kept up with the wonderful short stories on Scott’s Patreon. But the last time we got a new Astreiant book was in 2018! It has been some time! And we got many wonderful books from Scott between then and now (Water Horse may be my favourite of all her books so far) but YOU SEE PERHAPS WHY A NEW ASTREIANT BOOK IS AN EVENT!
If you’re not familiar with this series, you have plenty of time to get up to speed – Point of Hearts isn’t out until March! Plus, each book works perfectly well as a standalone, so you could probably just hop right into Point of Hearts without reading the others first, if you wanted. (But why would you want that???)
The series follows two queer men, Rathe and Eslingen, in their lives in the city of Astreiant: think matriarchal Elizabethan setting and you’re pretty much on the mark. Rathe is a pointsman, basically a detective, and Eslingen is his ex-mercenary lover who always winds up helping solve the mystery. It’s a queernorm world where astrology is not only real but extremely powerful, twice a year everyone’s ghosts come back to say hi, and flower-arranging can kill you. There’s so much political intrigue (although much of it is not the politics of the nobility, if that matters to you), the prose is rich and wonderful, and every last character is so incredibly human.
(Plus, although he doesn’t appear until book three, there is Sunflower, who is the Best Doggo!)
Passionately pleading with you to give this series a go – then you can flail with me as we wait for March!!!
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