it was pretty good, but I was expecting more. I wanted the story to flow better, the pacing to be more consistent and the characters better fleshed out. while I’m a big fan of HOTD, this book draws too much inspiration from that world. you don’t even have to squint to figure out which character is the mirror of which character from HOTD.

first things first, the world-building is quite confusing. there is a ton of information being thrown at the reader right from the start, and it was difficult to keep up - especially since so many words are inspired from Scottish Gaelic. while the book does provide a helpful pronunciation guide, I think a glossary would have been deeply appreciated, too. the truth is the constant information that I had to keep up with in the beginning took me out of the story many times. however, it really is a beautiful, complex world.

next, let’s talk about the characters. the main character, Aemyra (Rhaenyra who?) simply doesn’t act like a 26-year-old woman. her immaturity and disrespect and lack of rational thought made her read like a 16-year-old. because of that, I found it really hard to agree with her inner justifications that she is “the rightful queen” and “the only one who can save her people”. she needed to step up more instead of allowing her father to make all of the important decisions. also, she was constantly contradicting herself - one second preaching about wanting women to be free from oppression, free to choose what they want, and the next judging women that weren’t warriors.

on the other hand, Fiorean fell kind of flat, except for a couple of moments when he actually showed basic decency and was immediately attacked by Aemyra (there’s a scene where he apologies to her for his brother’s atrocious behaviour, and she just lashes out at him, which was a very odd reaction to have. very superficial “hate” for the sake of marketing this as enemies-to-lovers). basically, Fiorean needed more room to grow as a character.

all in all, there was a lot of potential here, but once I started seeing all the similarities with HOTD, I couldn’t enjoy this book as much.