Everina Maxwell

The Iskat Empire is held together by treaties, which are in turn sewn up with arranged marriages. Some of the subject planets are beginning to chafe under Iskat rule, so when the Iskat Prince Taam dies in a flight accident, his widower, Jainan, is hurriedly remarried off to another Iskat prince, Kiem. But a marriage between a prince whose reckless past has given him a reputation as a spoiled and disobedient royal and a quiet and deeply damaged widower who isn’t showing any actual willingness to remarry doesn’t seem like then bandage the empire needs. And when Taam’s death is revealed as a murder with Jainan as a suspect, the marriage only gets less likely to succeed. But there’s more to both Kiem and Jainan than anyone else sees, and possibly more between them than either could have hoped.

Sci-fi romance with an idiots-to-lovers trope? Yes, please. And it doesn’t disappoint.… (mehr)

Space opera in which the troublesome Tennalhin, rich boy nephew to the Legislator is caught and sent off not just to involuntary military service, but to a permanent roll as the synced reader (mind reader) to the young architect (mind writer) Lieutenant Surit Yeni, a stickler for rules. But Surit is such a stickler for rules that he and Tennal fake the sync because it is not voluntary. And then then things start to go very wrong.
The story is interesting, mostly well placed, the characters have appeal, but do not entirely convince. The backstory timeline of 20 years seems too short for the events it covers. And for a culture in which gender rolls seem to be entirely voluntary, they don't seem to mean anything and yet we are absolutely in a M/M romance. Since neither genitals nor secondary sexual characteristics are described, everything but events are up to the reader's imagination.… (mehr)