We need more queer adult fantasy books like this one. It was absolutely fantastic, lush in its world building, and nuanced in character depiction and actions. Fantasy is often a hit-or-miss genre for me, but there were moments when I didn't want to put this book down. If all fantasy books were like this, it'd be my favorite genre by far.

I really tried continuing this book but I’ve decided to DNF it, I just couldn’t get through it. I constantly had no idea on what was happening, the characters names are confusing. I really tried to like it and I was excited for it because I’ve read the authors other work and enjoyed it. I would like to add that I’m not adding a rating since I’m DNFing it. (I will post this on goodreads without rating). The writing was chunky and annoying, a lot of info dumping at the start and it was exhausting to continue.
If anyone was excited to read it as well: you could give it a try. maybe you will enjoy it.

I’m not sure what to say about this book. At its core I would call it a political family drama with a whole lot of fantasy elements thrown in for good measure.

We follow Koréshiza Brightstar, son of the magistrate who has been an outcast all his life. This courtesan turned politician aims to use his powers of manipulation and his intimate knowledge of those in power to bring his father down.

There were a couple of areas where this book fell down for me. First and foremost, over-complication. This started from the very beginning with a glossary of names and how to pronounce them. This would have been fine if the characters then didn’t also have nicknames that interchanged throughout the text.

The sheer amount of information being added to the plot at every turn took away from the core storyline and left me confused as hell. This book also had feint within feint within feint but the execution was frustrating more than clever.

The next let down was inconsistency. Our main character is revealed to be quite a powerful being early in the book but the source of his power changes. We are told one thing then shown another without it being a story arc of any kind. His motivations also chopped and changed at any given moment. We also have a love triangle which feels incredibly forced and the decisions made between these three characters … 🤦‍♂️

Had this not been an arc I likely would have DNF’d but it wasn’t all bad. I did appreciate the back story to our main character that we saw in the interludes, allowing the reader to piece together why he was acting certain ways at certain times. I also think the premise of the story is very cool. It just needed a lot less faff convoluting the plot to make it work.

This one sits at a 1.5 ⭐️ for me.

Unfortunately this isn't what I was expecting - I requested based on the author's tweets but the book isn't living up to the promise. It's so confusing - moreso than usual with fantasy - and I think I'm going to have to come back to it at a later date perhaps. It just isn't working for me right now.

I DNF'd this at 13.9%. I usually can get through at least until the 25% mark of a book before I call it quits. But this book just was so boring and I don't want to waste my time reading something that in the first 50 pages has not interested me in the least. The writing was exhausting to read, I fell asleep reading twice. There are extensive, detailed descriptions, hard-to-read names, long chapters...I had to read some sentences/paragraphs several times to understand, and at one point I just skipped the descriptions.
I've never seen names that were this hard to read. All the names are really difficult names and I just skipped over them at one point because I couldn't be bothered. There's a guide to the pronunciation at the beginning but that did not help (how am I supposed to remember how to pronounce them all when I'm trying to get into the world?). For example, Akizeké Shikishashir Dzaxashigé is so hard to even look at. Is that a name? Because most of the names have Dzaxashigé at the end. I just feel like character names should be easy to at least differentiate.
I felt like the world had too many elements in this. Dinosaurs, dragons, technology, and magic make no sense together, in my opinion. I need some sort of logic. Also, the world wasn't very described and I have no clue what it's supposed to be like.
Also, Koré could've been a cool character, further into the book, but I just found him annoying.
Overall, I think this was just not for me. A book needs to interest me in the first 50 pages and this just didn't.

Sadly I did not finish this ARC, I found myself cringing too much at the world building and long names. I don’t often dnf a book but when I do it’s because I’m so confused about the plot and why we needed to know he stopped itching because of essence. Not for me

I'm upset about this because I was *so* looking forward to this one, and I really enjoyed the author's young adult debut, but this one just wasn't for me.

It's very rare that I don't stick with a book until the end, but I only got three chapters in with this one. I found the world-building to be way too vague for such ambitious ideas, and I was genuinely just confused about everything I was reading, and the more I read, the more confused I got.

This book could probably be great with more time and editing, but it was a miss for me this time around.

DNF - not a book for me.

This was my second attempt of this book. It is long, confusing and convoluted with very little explained and not enough information to figure it out.

The main character is annoying and thinks way too highly of themselves.

The writing can be dry in places making me not want to work at trying to figure out this world and the politics at the heart of the story.

Good book, liked it, could have been better executed but overall nicely written whit a great plot that I really enjoyed.

Did not enjoy this book. Most of the names were needlessly unwieldy and impossible to read/pronounce, and I say this as a person of color with an extremely "ethnic-sounding" full name. The plot was too densely packed and not written in a way that made me care about the world-building. Every sentence was an infodump and I got tired of it real quick. As an Asian reader, it also felt very orientalist to me because of the silk and dragons motif/aesthetic it has going on throughout the book - it felt added just for kicks. It felt very fetishistic towards East Asian culture specifically.

I'm impressed by the fact it could mess up this badly in every category, the characters a are a mess, I dont understand what the plot is, there is world building but you get random facts that won't help you. It doesm't help at all undertsand what's happening. This is so fast paced, it killed it, in a matter pf pages you got to know a people and were betrayed not even 10 pages later.
Everything is overwhelming it's nice to have extra elements but to have gods, zombie , dragons, dinosaurs with no apparent reason is too much.
I didn''t even talk about the characters but to me they were all irrelevent.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for granting me a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.

The review is gonna be short. I didn't like it. Expected so much more and had some and i couldnt understand half of it.

Thanks to Rebellion for making this book available to me via #Netgalley

This book! First I enjoyed it and why did I enjoy it you might ask even after attempting to DNF it? Because of the ambitious plot. Yes I said that. This book really tried everything. SCI-FI, FANTASY, DRAGONS, POWERS, POLITICS, MATRIARCHY, SEX WORK, QUEER CHARACTERS, RIVARLY etc. This book had everything and sometimes it felt a bit much and I was sometimes left wanting the author to pick up the pace and other times slow it down.

The main issue that I had was that, similar to Dune we are thrown in head first and expected to just go along with the flow. However, once I got a good understanding of the society, the politics, powers and want our main character wanted to do, I became a happy camper.

If you loved Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon and the matriarchal society, then this is a book that might be right up your alley. The writing is so vivid and the imagination of the author is really wild. An entirely new world, with allegorical elements that points to current political and socioeconomic climate.

Just when you think women being in the position of 'men in our patriarchal society' might be the solution, this book presents that regardless of gender, power has a way of twisting and destroying even the 'most' nurturing!

Similar to Jade City by Fonda Lee, in this universe there is something called Essence , that people risk their lives trying to get as it grants the user strength and power. We follow Koreshiza who is trying to sabotage his father's campaign for political power. He knows that just having 'sex for information' and having a sugar mummy will not get him far but he knows that using his dragon-fire abilities will get him noticed and most definitely killed for his Essence!

I really enjoyed it, I just wished it explored few themes which would have made it easier to read and enjoy.

I had such mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the world building could have been, and I think it might be the best "gender bent" book I've ever read; it makes incredible social commentary by reversing the roles of men and women. I will say I spent about the first hundred pages of this book trying to figure out what on earth was going on. There are good ways to do "learn by immersion" and "show-don't-tell" - unfortunately, I'm not sure this book nailed those, since there were huge chunks of world building I still could barely grasp by the end. (In fact, there were a... whole lot... of pieces I never got at all.) It also really tries to do too much. It's got some unique ideas, but there are so many of them that it's really challenging to follow. And the one thing that absolutely murdered it for me was a) the main character, who just left a lot to be desired, and b) my personal least favorite fantasy trope, insta-love. And, while it's nice to see poly rep in a book, the love interests are both flat and felt very one-dimensional. Really interesting world, really potentially neat ideas, fascinating work around gender roles, and yet... just sort of flat.

This book was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really wish I had read the other reviews before requesting! I was excited to be approved because I love so many of the elements here--a matriarchal culture, intricate worldbuilding, a scheming courtesan protagonist, lots of queer representation--but unfortunately this book is just a hot mess.

I got this from NetGalley and these opinions are my own. I didn’t think this book was bad it just wasn’t for me. When it comes to fantasy novels or even sci-fi I sometimes have trouble being able to follow the creation of a world and all its facets, as was the case here. The concepts are really interesting and there are some different ideas but I struggled to really be able to follow what was going on. I think there are definitely people who would really enjoy this book, especially if your really into Fantasy.

Unfortunately, I had to DNF this book. The little I read was extremely convoluted and pretentious. The book jumped between the most random events and had the most annoying protagonist. The glaring anti-feminist sentiments in this book left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't see why a matriarchy must equal male oppression. I do not recommend this book.

I had been looking forward to reading this book, and was happy to be approved to do so early. However I just didn't connect with it all at and found it a struggle to finish

I really liked the concept!

This adult fantasy is full of political intrigue, world building and an interesting magic system. I liked the idea of the plot and the expansive world, but I think the writing was a big let down for me. It felt at times too descriptive, and pulled me out of the story. There's so much going on at once- there's all sorts of paranormal creatures, so it's more like blend of all the genres, but none of the substance. I wanted to find a new sci-fi that I could fall in love, but ultimately this moved so fast, there was no time to digest anything.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an e-arc!

Rating: 2/5 stars

Content Warnings: Violence, murder, on page sex scenes, sexual assault, slut shaming

Reading the blurb for this book had me really excited - it sounded fascinating and definitely my kind of thing. Unfortunately, in reality I really struggled to get through it. If I hadn't been going to review it, I likely would have given up and DNFed because I just found it quite exhausting to read. I was often confused about what was going on, and too much of what I did understand I wasn't a huge fan of.

Silk Fire is a real sci-fi/fantasy mashup, with world-building combining magical and technological elements. In this matriarchal society, Koré is a courtesan hell bent on getting revenge on his wealthy father, by sabotaging his run for political office. By chance, Koré is imbued with draconic power by a dying god, making him the last dragon - a new source of the previously finite supply of 'essence'. Koré navigates a world of political intrigue, with stakes rising with the appearance of a necromantic threat.

Though overall I really struggled with this book, there were some elements I enjoyed. This was mostly in the world-building. I thought the concept of essence was quite unique and interesting. I also appreciated the incorporation of queer characters. Koré, the main character, is bisexual, and many other leading characters are queer. Their queerness is important to their characters, but not all-encompassing, which was nice to see. I particularly liked the explanation of how trans characters fit in this world. The characters are complex (though sometimes a little too complex - all the back and forth double-crossing and betrayal was tough to follow at times) and I particularly liked Ria and Faziz, the two love interests.

However, I did have a fair few issues with the book. The story takes place in a matriarchal society, which had me a little on edge, since the author is a man. I do think women are better placed to write an effective matriarchal society, as we inherently better understand the nuances of patriarchy better than a man can. I definitely did have some issues with the portrayal of this type of gender power balance. I thought a lot of it was very on-the-nose, just taking the exact experiences of patriarchy and gender-swapping them. For example, there is talk of 'male representation in media' which is very much just taking criticisms of misogyny in media and swapping the pronouns. I just feel this is an inherently uninteresting way to portray a matriarchal society. It also grated on me a little that plenty of the nastier elements of real-life patriarchy are portrayed in this book, only gender swapped. Knowing that these descriptions of women perpetuating the terrible things that happen in real life TO women was written by a man made me a bit uncomfortable.

Silk Fire has a very complex plot, but the way it's written only serves to make it more confusing. This was a book I didn't find myself wanting to pick up to continue, because it felt like such a slog just trying to understand what was happening. Some other elements made it an awkward read - the dialogue is a real mix of the kind of language you'd usually find in fantasy books and also very modern, colloquial dialogue. I thought this was an interesting idea, but ultimately not well enough executed to make it anything more than disjointed and disorientating. While I definitely liked the concept of including fantasy elements alongside things like cameras, hoverships, and bad movies, I also felt like this just made the book feel like it didn't know what it wanted to be.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reader's copy of this book.