Strong content warnings, from the author: https://everinamaxwell.com/content-wa…
Thanks again to the dual recommendations from llamareadsbooks and CoffeeShopReader both!
Re-read (October 2021, review December 2021): I wanted to also re-read this book after The Charm Offensive and my re-read of Boyfriend Material, so I suppose the best theme you could stitch would be “gay HEAs, location notwithstanding.” I agree with the original reviews that this isn’t really a romance first scifi novel, but perhaps it’s more of a mood that you have to go into it with. On this second re-read, I found it very romantic, in a deep and connected way.
I find myself, unfortunately, ageing out of empathizing with YA books as I get older. It’s not that I don’t find them engaging–I absolutely do, and I read them with some regularity–but it’s harder for me to find their takeaway messages personally compelling. I’m of the age where my peers have been in multiple long-term, this is the one relationships, after all. I just can’t take a teenage or early 20s character saying “this is the one” very seriously, although I always enjoy stories of people discovering parts of themselves that they didn’t realize.
So this book is great, again, because both Jainan and Kiem are older and wiser, and the weight of their decisions is heavy (an entire galactic treaty rests on them). I also didn’t realize that this book was originally published as original fanfiction on AO3–take that, everyone who thinks that fanfiction isn’t “real writing.” I can also see how that online story was edited to form a more cohesive novel. Fanfic readers often can fill in gaps with the tropes that we love, but book readers don’t have the same context to draw from? Maxwell did a great job with threading that needle, and I hope she’s happy with her publishing journey (and no one gives her grief for it, like has been done to other authors).
Such an easy recommendation to give to others, with just the right amount of backstory and forward plot to make it such that you can get engrossed without knowing that you’ve signed yourself up for a trilogy that might turn into a quadrology and which the author hasn’t written…