Posted by This has an interesting title. I usually jive with Fantasy Faction’s finalist picks — probably more than any other judging group. So despite it being described as a sapphic fantasy romance, which is a major hit and miss genre for me, I was excited to start.
We follow the main character, Tiller, as she’s trying to lay her grandmother to rest per her last request. She and her family were “foresters” and lived in this now uninhabitable wilderness that’s become too dangerous to reside in. However, her grandmother’s last wish was to be buried in the place she called home — ya, that same super dangerous forest. This mission is dangerous and she needs a mage to go with her. However, only one mage took the offer and she’s sort of an outlier in the mage community. She has a larger than life personality and makes a point not to blend in but to stand out and turn heads as she walks through a room. She’s a soldier/mage and she’s always looking to do the most risky thing possible, so she’s either the best pick for this mission or the worst, but it doesn’t matter because she’s the only one willing to go.
Both of these women have a big secret to keep, both secrets could end up in life threatening situations if they were ever made public. Carnelian, the larger than life mage has way too many magical cores due to a botched experiment when she was younger. Tiller has blue hair. This shouldn’t mean much since Tiller says that all the wild theories about “Blues” are just that, wild theories that hold no water in real life. However, society believes that Blues are wielders are untold power, and to sacrifice one will bring the one doing the sacrificing immense power. So, in order not to be ritually sacrificed, she has to keep her hair hidden from everyone. Both of them figure out each other’s secrets real quick and it leads to an interesting dynamic as they try and go on their quest.
The setting is pretty cool, called Jace, it’s kind of Japanese adjacent. It’s an island nation with eight big islands and tons/thousands of little islands scattered throughout the territory. The author resides in Japan and you can definitely tell there are elements from the Japanese culture and landscape were drawn upon to build this world. I really liked the world and the landscape, it made for a really fantasy-like setting and something a bit different from the rest of my SPFBO reads this year. In this world there are “mages” and “operators” which have a symbiotic kind of relationship. When mages use their powers they can damage themselves and they need healing from the operators. Each mage usually has an operator designated to them, and it just so happens that Tiller is an operator and Carnelian is a mage, so the idea is they’d make a good team. Carnelian even proposes a marriage of convenience offering to be a ‘mage wife’ because mages who aren’t married don’t have a lot of options, they’re usually ‘owned’ by the government if they don’t have a family that claims them. Most families let the government have them because up until the age of 16, any damage a mage does falls on the family to make amends or pay the price — and it can be super costly.
So, as these two go on their trek they start to kind of fall for one another and there’s this romance going on. If you’re familiar with my reviews you’ll know that romance is a big hit or miss category for me, and unfortunately, I just didn’t like either of these characters and so the romance was a miss. This is largely due to personal taste and I’d say the romance itself was well-written, I just fucking hated Carnelian. I don’t tend to like larger than life characters, they annoy me in real life and on the page. There’s also a big reveal at the end about the backstory of Carnelian and honestly it was supposed to bring out some sympathy, and it did a little bit, but not as much as I think it was intended to because ultimately I ended up disliking her even more.
This was a personal taste miss for me, but my ultimate score is an 8/10 for SPFBO because it’s well paced, well written, and I’d recommend it to people who like sassy characters with a lot of banter and a going on an adventure love story.
Kristen is working on this one and so 8/10 is not our final score, when I get Kristen’s score I’ll add it to my own and have a score for the board. She’s more of a romance person than I am, so I’m interested in reading her thoughts.