Orc and Her Bride

It's too much effort to hate you.

Such a nice quick read to pass a few hours with! I enjoyed this story about a prickly, bratty elven princess and her orc betrothed who's a veritable angel in the flesh. I admit that in the first half of the books, the two were really hard to ship because of Elketh's outrageous shenanigans. I kind of wanted to rescue Ruga from her instead. However, by the middle of the story, the chemistry between the two became so apparent it was hard not to get invested. I liked that Elketh had to face some actual consequences for her actions, but I also liked that, despite displaying some character growth and redeeming qualities, she still remained rash, prickly, and difficult, just in a more subdued way. It can be nice to see difficult people find love, too.

The worldbuilding here is fairly simplistic, with elves being just these long-living elves and orcs being just these long-living vikings, but there were a lot of cool small details that gradually made it feel more alive and original. I very much appreciated how delightfully queernorm the setting is. I also liked how ingrained into the setting the MCs were, especially Ruga since we spend most of the story in her home. All of her hobbies, her connections to the people around her, her habits, and also the way Elketh kept discovering and adjusting to all that—that definitely turned the setting into an immersive, lived-in place and not just a fantastical backdrop for the romance story.

The one thing that detracted from my enjoyment to an extent was the prose; I found it rather clunky, to the point that it often got in the way. There were times when I had to re-read a sentence a few times to figure out if it was missing a word or just very awkwardly structured, and there were also things like that one paragraph where the word 'letter' was used so many times it began to lose all meaning. Perhaps the novel could have benefitted from an extra round of editing.