Starting off Pride Month with a less than stunning book, I guess… this book had an alluring cover and my library had a copy, so I was curious—that and the fact it was published by Tor Books, a mainstream publisher, gave me pause. Surely, this must be worthy of its mainstream status. The blurb was not that interesting but it did hint that there might be fascinating political elements or perhaps some suspense. I like my science fiction to have compelling world-building or at least some decent science as well as interesting characters, but this book failed on both of those counts.

The book unceremoniously inserts the reader into the world, throwing different planetary names and alliances at you before you really understand what is going on. This isn’t that unusual of a tactic so I took it in stride, but the author never managed to truly establish appropriate context for the different types of alliances or why one should care about certain groups (e.g. the Empire or the Resolution) in the book until very late in the novel, and even then not in great detail. The setup of the alliances and planets was also a rather dull reiteration of colonial structures, but in space… which is not particularly innovative.

I was also annoyed with the author’s treatment of gender in the book—gender is entirely about gender presentation, without reference to an internal sense of gender or physical gender at all. It felt extremely stereotypical, like an ally’s understanding of how trans people feel… as if a mere haircut or clothing choice would be sufficient to designate gender. Even in an ideal fantasy world where acceptance and understanding of presentation is the norm, gender is way more complex than that. This, along with the random insertion of non-binary characters and the narrative stopping to note certain signs of gender on-page, made the whole thing seem performatively woke.

I am not really into romance as it is, but the romance subplot really takes over most of the novel so that it felt like ‘romance with a side of sci-fi’ rather than the other way around. Most of the sci-fi elements revolve around the progression of the romance, and there is a sprinkle of science thrown in, but ultimately it is not as coherent or meaningful as it could have been to the overarching plot. The pacing was also way off for most of the book. Finally, the resolution of the plot relies on extremely predictable plot lines and rather convenient dei ex machina to tie everything in a neat bow. Hirondelle put it well: “But it is really really long and full of old fashioned romance tropes like big misunderstandings and too stupid to live characters with lots of big misunderstandings and the sf background is just decoration.”

The characters were also extremely dull—they felt kind of like cardboard cutouts. I was particularly annoyed with Jainan’s character because he has some repetitive tendencies that made his narrative voice extremely grating. Spoilers: From the beginning, he’s like a puppy that’s been kicked and is terrified of even his own shadow. It was relatively easy to anticipate the abuse backstory, which made Jainan’s constant self-doubting and learned helplessness superfluous. As a person I am sympathetic to his struggles, but as a reader I could not care about the character. He seemed more like a wounded teen girl than an adult man who is nearly 30. This, combined with the literally overnight development of the romance, was so cliché I could groan. Kiem also had issues where he seemed rather immature for his age, but I think that’s intentional, so it’s less of a problem. The two main characters suffered from a serious case of assuming-instead-of-conversing for the majority of the book, which I would not expect two adults who have been steeped their entire lives in political and diplomatic nonsense to engage in. Leigh's review goes into this aspect a lot more clearly than I could.

I believe this started as an online story through Archive of Our Own, and it makes sense—the book’s style seems very reminiscent of fanfiction. Usually you are working with established worlds and established characters, so there is never a need to develop personalities or backgrounds for the worlds you use in the story; both author and reader already know all of the details when they read fanfiction, presumably. However, this is an original story, and as such it sorely needed all of these elements to feel like a full-fleshed novel rather than… whatever this is. Pretty cover aside, this was ultimately a disappointing read.