Note: I received a free unpublished proof of this book, for a limited time, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.
*This title includes graphic violence, graphic sexual content, and very heavy themes of genocide, war, abuse, substance use, imprisonment, and emotional manipulation; hence I only recommend it to adult readers (18+). Well, I don’t recommend this one, but I think it would be especially bad as a kids’ book.*
Where do I even start.
I have read a lot of books this year, many of them mediocre. I have read books by people who are trying too hard to be Stephen King. Books by people who think they can seamlessly shoehorn the characters from their existing series into an anthology and expect us to understand what’s going on in their Suggsverse-esque grittier take on *Percy Jackson* crossed with *Zodiac Academy* with little to no exposition. Books by people who don’t seem to know the difference between a “book” and a “blog post compilation.” Books by people who learned everything they know about neopaganism from Silver RavenWolf, Wikipedia, and load-bearing amounts of “well, I think that would be cool.” Boring short stories and novelettes that are good but don’t interest me that much. And then there are all of the bland takes on cyberpunk, Old West horror, superhero fiction, Greek mythology retelling, slasher movies in written form, and whatever Dan Brown’s genre is that just make me sigh and ask myself why I’m staying up until 2 am to finish this thing.
Yet—perhaps with the exception of the guy making badly-cited claims that flu vaccines and vitamin supplements aren’t necessary, and that WWII bookshop historical fiction piece—none of these books have made me nearly as angry as this one.
I was totally on board with the *idea* of this book. I do, after all, have a soft spot for stories about guys who have been banished from their societies after their homes have been destroyed and their families presumably killed by losers who wanted to steal their societies’ resources, who now sit in exile plotting escape. That’s the sort of thing I really tend to go for, as a matter of fact.
However, this book went downhill. Fast.
In the beginning, there were some aspects that I found inventive. For instance, while the protagonist, Vilas, is imprisoned, he still has food, water, and shelter. He even has books to read, sunlight, and some plants. Hence, it doesn’t end up being a) a survival story about people living in the woods like Bear Grylls, despite being in a world with sufficient fantasy and tech that this shouldn’t be a main plot point or b) a grimdark story about some dude being endlessly tortured by the establishment in gruesome ways and left to stare at the wall the rest of the time. That’s good. I don’t like either of those subgenres.
I also found Vilas’ desire for “revenge” somewhat reasonable. I put “revenge” in quotes because, at the time this story takes place, he is the last living member of his society. The rest have been murdered by the military of the main city-state who wanted to take their resources. (Vilas’ city-state didn’t have a problem with sharing their resources, but the rulers in the larger city-state wanted them all for themselves.) When the book starts, his imprisoners are still taking his people’s dead bodies from their destroyed land and grinding them up into drugs to give themselves powers. Given that any society that does this will likely do it again once they find some other group of people who has something they want—and they are only keeping Vilas around to study him—destroying the main city-state seems less like “revenge” and more just a pragmatic move of self-preservation at this point.
At the beginning, Vilas tries to get his freedom by offering to be the queen’s superpowered weapon in exchange for getting to sleep with her. (This is partly because of a plot point related to her superpowers, not just him thinking she’s hot.) This honestly came off as a little bit gross and uncomfortable at first, but given that she has the power to not only refuse but to literally kill him at the drop of a hat and eat his bones, it’s more of a desperate escape attempt than “man takes advantage of woman.”
Over the course of the story, the queen and her government essentially use Vilas and his superpowers to try to destroy various enemies who are invading, including some other city-state and some rock giants. The queen controls how much of his power he can use and how he uses it in order to prevent him from actually escaping and destroying the city-state, which he has already threatened to do. We meet a few other characters who are his sidekicks, including some fast smart archer girl and a guard we are supposed to sympathize with because he didn’t technically take part in the genocide himself. There’s this whole thing with figuring out how the rock giants are involved and a bit where some other army tries to kill Vilas to use his powers, but his sidekicks put an end to that.
Really, I was…okay with most of this. The writing was a little bit choppy in terms of flow and how things were introduced and explained/not explained, but given that it was one of the author’s first books I could forgive the crunchy writing. Everybody’s early writing is crunchy. My early works certainly were.
And then the whole thing really goes downhill.
The queen and Vilas finally sleep together as she promised, which he believed would fully unlock his powers because of something with her own powers. Long story short, she takes away nearly all of his power and laughs at how she has outmaneuvered him. Naturally, he runs off to try to destroy the city with what power he does have, and then his sidekicks talk him out of it. Which I guess is fair enough, because he would likely hurt people who didn’t really have anything to do with what happened to his city-state because a number of years have passed and people from other places who had nothing to do with the genocide are in the same city. He gets captured and brought back to the queen.
The queen then reveals that Vilas is not the only surviving member of his society, introducing him to this girl who also survived whom she’s been hiding from him this whole time. She also reveals that she was planning to acknowledge that the genocide was a bad thing and stop doing that. Again, she only reveals all of this *after* she’s imprisoned him, used him for her own goals, and taken his power away.
So what does Vilas do? He decides to abandon the idea of revenge, *because he realizes he’s been beaten and he figures he should work alongside the queen since she is clearly smarter than him since he couldn’t outsmart her, and therefore he is childish and wrong for wanting revenge.*
That’s right, kids: if you’re bullied by somebody who proceeds to lie to you, take advantage of you, emotionally manipulate you, and withhold information you have every right to know, and you weren’t able to figure out that they were lying and manipulating you…well, maybe you deserved it because you weren’t smart enough to figure it out! And if you decide to not take revenge on them, do so not because it won’t fix anything, you’d hurt yourself in the process, or even because Jesus said so…don’t take revenge because your bully was smarter all along and you should try to learn from them! (If it wasn’t obvious, this is sarcasm on my part.)
This is honestly one of the most harmful messages I’ve seen in a fantasy book. Framing someone who’s trying to take down a totalitarian, genocidal regime as a childish, short-sighted person who just wants revenge is, to put it lightly, incredibly problematic. Yes, there are many situations where violence is not the answer, but not because the oppressors are secretly right somehow; it’s because violence also destroys things that you don’t want destroyed. The queen only reveals that she is against more genocide *after* she’s used Vilas, so she can accuse him of being closed-minded for not knowing something she deliberately kept from him that he would have no reason to assume. This is classic alt-right, Daily-Wire, “if you can’t figure out my deliberately confusing mind game that is deliberately designed to get you to shut up instead of giving a concrete and relevant answer, you are wrong” material, and Vilas is the archetypal “woke college student” who supposedly got “owned” when it was never a fair debate to begin with. This is the same kind of manipulative language that teachers, parents, and universities use on young people who rightfully complain that they’re being treated unfairly. Even if Vilas’ plan could ultimately do more harm than good, there is no genuine attempt on anybody’s part to actually respect him, understand how he got to this point, or atone for their actions against him and his people. There is no real reconciliation or reparation, only shoving him into a corner where he’s forced to go along with things, only revealing any “good” actions or opinions to try to manipulate him into changing his mind.
Yet the author of this book tries to frame this as some sort of wholesome tale of reformation on Vilas’ part. This feels like it was written by a toxic, abusive person who realizes that what they did was wrong, but rather than try to make up for it with their actions, well, they’ve changed now, and deep down they had people’s best interests at heart even if they were mean about it and the other person just didn’t understand, so can we just stop talking about this and get on with it??? If the author is not this sort of person, I think they just don’t understand how people actually act and think.
The whole sex part of this makes the whole thing worse. Given how much focus there is on it, I think the author was kind of going for a dark romance angle here, but this falls flat. See, as somebody who genuinely enjoys romantic fantasy sometimes, I do think that there needs to be genuine *romance* in order for dark romance to work. If your hero is Edgy McEdgelord, he still needs to have genuine chemistry with bookish-but-spunky heroine Clumsy McMessybun. They need to have a reason to like each other, no matter how improbable. If you’re doing enemies-to-lovers, they do, in fact, need to have some character development in between those two stages. If your two leads are serial killers, they still need to have *some* moral compass, however askew, that causes them to care about each other. If your leads are rival vampires at an elite English literature program in Dracula’s castle, they need to have some common ground that causes them to go beyond their academic rivalry and actually like each other.
Meanwhile, there is no romance in a prisoner offering sex as part of a last-ditch escape attempt to the queen of a genocidal state who is only keeping him alive to use him as a weapon. I suppose it’s different from a lot of romantasy in that the *woman* is the creepy abusive war criminal, but that doesn’t make it better. Given the weirdness of the set up, I almost wonder if this is some sort of fetish thing and we aren’t supposed to take the rest of the story that seriously, to which I say, you can still write something dark, edgy, and tense without sending terrible messages about how oppressed people are supposed to feel about violence against them.
Overall, I won’t stop anybody from reading this book. Just because I would have smashed my physical copy with a sledgehammer if it weren’t an ebook doesn’t mean I think we should censor the thing. I just thought it was very bad.
I guess what kills me the most is that there is a *lot* of potential for a genuinely romantic story involving a hero who has been in solitude for a long time due to horrifying events and leaves his greenhouse-esque land of exile to return to his spouse, or meets a new love interest who wanders into the place where he’s trapped. That isn’t a bad idea in and of itself. But this book is not it.

An interesting story of a captured magical being reluctantly helping those who keep him prisoner for a taste of his old powers back. The dynamic between Vilas and Tano is the most engaging part, besides all the cool magic. A deeply unique and visually pleasing setting that I really enjoyed picturing. The descriptions were fun to read and I enjoyed the picture they created in my mind. The scene of Vilas returning home after years was particularly striking. Overall, a well crafted story that kept me interested and feeling for the characters. Well done!