Chelsea

Y'all. This.....was the wlw YA fantasy/sci-fi I've been searching for??? After so many years of reading so many (not so great) books, I finally found a pretty great one.

My brain is fried from this whole entire year, so here are some bullet points:

✓ Compulsively readable
✓ Enemies to (kinda, almost) lovers, back to enemies
✓ Non-human wondering CAN I LOVE???? (A classic. Spoiler alert: she can.)
✓ REBELLING AGAINST A CORRUPT AND PREJUDICED REGIME
✓ Being queer is totally normalized and isn't the cause of any of the conflict

✕ A tiny bit more insta-lovey than I prefer but honestly not bad for YA
✕ Would've loved more development of the side characters

I enjoyed this so much and I can't wait for the next one!

Reminder that this book is great and so underrated and y'all should read it!!!!

“I was so fucking tired of men deciding whether or not I got to go on existing for another day.”

Those last few chapters had me cheering and screaming like one of those rabid sports fans T B H

I love me a good Monsters/Humanity Venn Diagram book. Can monsters show humanity? Can humans be monstrous? We already know the answers, but it's the HOW and the WHY that can be so riveting, and this book delivers. The world-building and the paranormal elements introduced were fascinating, although I would have liked to learn a little more about some of the side characters (ZEKE!!!, Jake, and Violet in particular). I'm eagerly anticipating a follow up book entitled The Adventures of Undead Girl and the Ghoul Brothers.

I also really loved that the main character is bisexual (very openly and clearly–she even uses the B word!!!), but she doesn't have a main romantic arc in the book. I <3 queer romance but sometimes it's nice to just have queer characters...doing things...other than falling in love. Like, for example, clawing their way out of a grave with their bare hands and accidentally getting kidnapped by a cult. You know, ~Just Queer Girl Things~.

ARC provided by NetGalley

Oh man, this was a book with so much potential. Russian folklore, a decreed marriage between a brooding prince and a supernatural thief, adventure and witchcraft. But ultimately it fell short for me, excepting a handful of delightful but intermittent moments.

I think this book mostly suffered from a lack of focus. I love books that are layered and more than one thing at a time, but I spent a good portion of this book trying to decide if it was a romance disguised as a fantasy, a fantasy disguised as a romance, a hodgepodge of fairytale retellings, or a political what-not-to-do handbook. The world-building was intriguing, and I especially appreciated that the author created a culture where people had more freedom in their sexuality and gender roles, which is too rare within the fantasy genre. But I found myself very confused about the world itself–the borders and the rulers and the interplay between the dukes and the nations. Names and places and historical events were thrown around as if I were supposed to know their importance, without ever hearing them mentioned before. A map at the beginning of the book would have helped immensely with that, I think.

The main strength and most enjoyable part of this book for me was the relationship between the two main characters, Nazar and Aleksei. Forced to marry all because Nazar accidentally made the sullen prince smile, they form a hesitant but friendly alliance. My favorite scenes of the whole book were the ones where they were alone together, pushing each other to question their beliefs and the meaning of their lives.

But the pacing of their relationship and the story in general was...really off. I'm usually all for a book jumping into the story at the start with little to no exposition, but this book really could've used some. The book starts immediately AFTER the Big Thing happens that puts all the rest of the story into motion: Nazar stealing from the Tsar and making Aleksei–the apparently never-smiling Tsesarevich–smile. Or smirk. Whatever. I don't really know how it went down because we only get to read about it in retrospect. Then within 35 pages they are married (yes okay that's fine, because the plot requires it), but also getting physically and emotionally intimate. That's a little much for a book that isn't erotica. Over time they do form a more meaningful bond, but it all felt a little artificial after their speedy beginning. So then they're on this quest, which, after the extremely fast-paced opening, I expected to be full of action and adventure. Instead, there is some sitting on horses, and then there's some sitting in buildings, and then there's some sitting on horses again, and then back to the buildings. Most of the middle half of this book was So. Slow. The last 1/4 picked up again, but like the first 1/4, so much happened in so little time that it just felt like an avalanche of plot and information.

Overall this book had some sweet and thought-provoking scenes, and really interesting and unique ideas, but the unbalanced pace and the sporadic world-building left me feeling disappointed with the execution.

Cute! Witchy! Sister love! Important message(s)! Sapphic girls!

This was lovely, if a little underdeveloped. Would have loved to see the characters/relationships/story fleshed out more, especially the last third of the book. But this had all the soft, magical, sometimes sweet, sometimes sad summer vibes that I live for!!!

HELLO HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR DAMIANOS OF AKIELOS

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The first time you read this book, you start off a little unsure. ‘Is the master/slave dynamic really for me? It's not something I usually have any interest in' you might think. This book goes hard, right from the start. It is not for the faint-hearted. It includes all the elements of the master/slave trope that would usually make me run the other way screaming ‘NO THANKS, SATAN.' Sexual slavery, rape, abuse, torture, pedophilia...it's all there, permeating the background of this story. But—this is the important part—absolutely none of it is glorified. Captive Prince takes the typical master/slave trope and flips it on its ugly head, challenges it to be something else, something better. And oh boy, does it succeed.

My first read of this book was a back-and-forth of two constantly battling emotions. Emotion 1: appalled—by the world and the characters' actions and wondering What The Hell Is Happening. This works because you know you're supposed to feel appalled. Pacat writes that feeling into every negative encounter, and she manages to do it in a way that feels natural, rather than heavy-handed. Emotion 2: completely engrossed—in the world-building and the characters' interactions and wondering What The Hell Is Gonna Happen Next. This works because you stay up until the wee hours of the morning flipping pages and glaring at the clock as if you could stop time by sheer force of will (Laurent probably could).

My rereads went much the same way: equally APPALLED and ENGROSSED. But there's a new level of appreciation to take away from book one after you've read book two. Everyone and their librarian agrees that book two is superior, but part of that is because book two begins to reveal the many hidden layers of book one that you didn't even know to look for the first time around. And once you go back and reread, you realize there's a whole lot more to book one than you initially thought. More plotting and scheming. More brilliant writing. More investment in the characters and their relationships. More pain.

Other thoughts (nowhere near an exhaustive list): Gorgeous writing. Gorgeous. Pacat can write a simple phrase and make you fall in love. Or cut your heart out of your chest, still beating. Every single page is packed with action, emotion, deception, and intrigue—every time I finish this book I think ‘there is no way that was less than 300 pages.' And every time, I am wrong. Fascinating, unreliable narration, by a lovable narrator. Witty, clever dialogue. Tension so thick you could turn it into stew. Some of the most interesting and engaging character and relationship development I've ever read. In short: I LOVE! THIS! BOOK! I LOVE! THIS! SERIES!

But listen, I was doomed to love it from the moment I found out the main character was a bisexual prince with a big ol' heart of gold. So. That's where I stand.

Wow, this book was ambitious. I have to give it so much credit just for the number of diverse issues and places and cultures it represented. It's difficult for me to rate, because while I didn't always enjoy it, and sometimes found my interest slipping in a particular scene, overall I think this book did some inspired, unique things, and tackled some very underrepresented topics in a fascinating way. The first half was wonderfully engaging; the politics of the second half lost me a little bit and I found the plot and characters less exciting. I do wish the book as a whole had more focus. While I did appreciate the many different character perspectives, I found some of them tedious and redundant–a few could have been fairly easily omitted or consolidated. I did love that Lisette and Daisy's relationship was sort of the tether binding the book together, helping to balance all the transitions of time and place the book went through. And the shifts in their relationship was a perfectly constructed mirror for the shifts that took place in Everfair: a combination of love and sacrifice, betrayal and insult, consolidation and peace. Overall I think this is an important book for its brazen stance on colonialism, race relations, and what it means to fight for a home that has been stolen.