books i read in april-may 2026
May. 13th, 2026 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositethis batch of reviews includes spoilers for: little eyes - samanta schweblin, the poet empress - shen tao, inheritance - christopher paolini, twisted love & twisted games - ana huang.
little eyes - samanta schweblin (dnf)
book club pick that left me ambiently pissed off and i ended up passively dnf’ing at 50% just out of lack of desire to continue going. took me ages to even get that far because the combination unusual story structure and strange scifi concept with no romance was throwing me off and it’s too Literary to really hold my interest and also the women and girls are constantly being subjected to shocking sexual situations like um okay when you’re at the function and can’t help noticing misogyny bleeding through the cracks etc. i didn’t have a good time. the central conceit is there are these robotic pets called kentukis which are being remote controlled by strangers somewhere else in the world. i just genuinely could not suspend my disbelief as to why anyone would want to engage with the kentuki system as an owner or as a controller like what is anyone on either side of this transaction gaining. why would a normal person let a random guy in their house considering that the random guy is explicitly there to voyeuristically observe them or they wouldn’t have bought the connection licence in the first place. get a roomba if you want a robotic pet you can’t really communicate with?
i understand a little bit more why someone might be curious enough about other people’s lives or perverted enough (but a lot of the kentuki controllers are just normal guys as well) to be a kentuki on the other end but it’s just so weird and this is what like diml vlogs and stalking real estate listings and google streetview and such are for already like you can already insert yourself into other people’s lives and be nosy in so many different ways i don’t understand what gap in the market the kentuki is meant to fill. you just can’t convince me this would have been a successful product launch with any demand let alone that it made it past the first regulatory hurdle.
like i’m generally quite willing to go where a story leads me but when it’s otherwise so grounded in the real world i need more believable worldbuilding to support something even if it is clearly intended to function as a metaphor first and foremost. i think i’d be more forgiving if it was magic rather than tech. i am entirely aware that the point of the kentuki tech is to explore themes of like voyeurism and internet-enabled connection despite anonymity and communication without physical interaction/language and whatever but it was so annoying though. and again why was every woman/girl embroiled in some weird sexual shit with the kentukis.
the book is a series of mostly unconnected vignettes though some of the storylines continue throughout. but the cast is like a revolving door so it’s hard to get invested in any particular guy enough to want to read more about what happens to them especially because i think the kentuki thing is so stupid so i don’t really care about the hidden identity / noncommunication induced tension. i really don’t care about normal people having normal people problems with a little bit of robot set dressing. i think this has made me realise i much prefer hard scifi to soft scifi or at least something where the scifi element has literally any impact on the worldbuilding. since the kentuki functions as a symbol for things that already exist irl it might as well not be scifi at all and then it’s like well why am i reading this then.
i did think the vignette where a caretaker at a retirement home buys a couple of kentukis as companions for the elderly residents who immediately kill themselves upon realising where they are was probably the most effective. but this doesn’t really mean anything. maybe scheblin manages to pull it all together in the second half of the book but i don’t really care enough to find out.
the poet empress - shen tao
did you read she who became the sun and wish that it was midder? did you read the cruel prince and wish that it was chinese and had no romance and was also midder? did you read the poppy war and wish that it had lower highs and higher lows ie that it was also also midder? if so, this may be the book for you!
this is a book about wei yin, a peasant girl who marries as a concubine into the royal family and has to rapidly learn the game of thrones and how to write magic poetry with the intent to kill her evil sadistic husband the crown prince terren before he becomes king and dooms the country with his evil sadistic ways. overall i think the book was fine. i am not mad that i read it and it is very fastpaced so easy to get through (too fastpaced maybe, it could have benefitted from lingering on moments of emotional significance a little longer) but i will probably never think about it again. i haven’t had a lot of luck with east asia inspired fantasy but this is probably one of the better ones i’ve read.
it is not a romantasy, i believe op has described it as an anti-romantasy? so i knew what i was getting into but i wasn’t happy about it because the romance literally was hitting lmao i think that terren is meant to be such an awful vicious abuser that even once wei yin learns about the extreme trauma he went through and terren obviously starts to fall in love with wei yin and she understands him well enough to love him in the newtype sense (absence of romance is the most romantic thing in the universe etc) the harm he did to her and will do to the country cannot be forgiven and she kills him anyway. like it leans very heavily on the typical dark romantasy setup of a cruel prince who is softened by the heroine and ultimately “redeemed” by love but there is no love or redemption, only the killing knife. unfortunately i like the typical dark romantasy setup played straight so i was pretty mad about the bait. like terren tortures wei yin to the point where she is repeatedly almost bleeding to death and op was obviously writing all of this to be horrifying and not romantic but i did unfortunately find parts of it romantic anyway once he started shifting into lima syndromed pet sociopath mode because wei yin’s gambit was working đ
one of the most compelling (and, to me, romantic) scenes in the whole book is after wei yin crosses a personal moral boundary by framing a loyal eunuch who had helped her before because he was threatening to expose her secrets so she’s already in a huge amount of turmoil and then the next morning she walks outside and her entire household has been absolutely slaughtered by terren body parts everywhere she has to put beloved handmaiden friend out of her misery and pretend she’s grateful to terren for getting rid of the traitors in her retinue. obviously she’s super upset and angry about it and he’s like Are you mad:( and she’s like [struggling not to throw up and or ruin long term plans by trying to murder him in revenge on the spot] Not really and he’s like You didn’t like that?:( and she’s like Not really and he tries to cheer her up by granting her a month off to go see her family and take a bunch of famine relief to them. Like brother you did just kill and dismember all her friends i would say she probably didn’t like that. but my heart fluttered a bit anyway.
i do think that extreme power imbalances and murderous intent including murder attempts can be successfully navigated in a happy endgame romance. i do actively enjoy het romance where the guy holds all of the institutional power and leverages it to inflict tangible and repeated harm on the girl, although this is predicated on the girl being able to exert increasing amounts of power and influence over the guy on a personal level and/or (preferably and) making her own play at obtaining institutional power because while i love a fixed power dynamic it needs some kind of balance for long term equilibrium and i find societally enforced extreme misogyny upsetting to read about. i do even like it when the girl kills the guy but only after a real reciprocated romance is entered which means they need believable reasons to be in love even if they don’t like each other. but that was not the story op wanted to tell and that’s fine it just meant that i liked it less.
as an average newtype enjoyer i liked the premise of wei yin being forced to understand terren as a person because the only way to kill him is with a specific poem-spell that can only be created and used by somebody who loves the target enough to completely understand their heart in a metaphorical sense thus being able to physically reach it through the figurative-literal bridging power of poetry, it’s a great chicken/egg bind and dovetails nicely into the idea of love / empathy / perfect understanding not being enough. wei yin having to detective her way through various people’s biased and conflicting accounts and memories of terren to frankenstein together the truth about who he really is was fun because it reminded me of mystery stories i have liked before. i think it’s important that she was able to fully understand and know him and all the trauma that turned him into the sart of like an evil porson he is today and acknowledge that he was a victim of immense suffering but that doesn’t cancel out the immense suffering he has caused and will continue to cause, and still make the choice to kill him.
things i would have liked to see more of:
i also think that the ending was a bit too giftwrappedly neat like well yay education and literacy for women and the end of the famine for the country and an emperor that is not evil probably. how nice that everything worked out for the best all at the same time. good for them. 5/10 it was fine.
fave line: … the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them. I did not know what else to call it, if not love.
inheritance - christopher paolini
started my reread sometime last year but i left the physical book (which i preordered at dymocks so i would have it immediately upon release btw i was a real eragonhead) at my parents’ place so i’ve been listening on and off to the audiobook while i walk around. it wasn’t good but you know what it wasn’t bad. at one point i was even looking forward to eragon’s pov chapters because the vroengard adventures were fun and i was getting really scared by nasuada’s literal torture chamber pov and roran was as usual boring as hell. it’s the most generic fantasy story ever but i’ve got to give cpaolini his flowers for having the guts to make eragon’s endgame Leaving Forever And Never Coming Back. my favourite protag narrative conclusion is literal or metaphorical apotheosis because i love when a protag moves further and further away from their loved ones throughout their hero’s journey even as they work to protect those loved ones until they become so distant they are on another plane entirely and can no longer return. permanent separation and severance from humanity in the course of saving humanity my beloveddd.
so i really appreciated seeing that here even though i’ve never cared much for eragon, and i also really appreciated that no romance ever eventuated between eragon and arya. i think cpaolini got better at writing arya as a person with motivations and feelings separate from what eragon wants from her or projects onto her throughout the series, and it was a pleasant surprise that eragon acknowledged and respected arya’s boundaries instead of being annoyingly pushy and making his crush her problem like he did in eragon/eldest. like i was genuinely touched by the ending where eragon and arya part forever, probably the warmest i ever felt about their relationship dynamic and the most romantic i thought they got. i could believe that by the end of the series eragon had grown into someone that arya respected and considered a true and dear friend.
the murtagh/nasuada tinhet so buzzy like yes the nasuada torture scenes were straight landmines because i am really easily scared but the lotus eater dream galbatorix gives her where she’s happily married to murtagh i ate delicious although 4 kids in 8 years made me die like get off her omg. it’s really beautiful that murtagh’s love for and desire to save nasuada was what saved him too because it altered him so deeply it changed his true name. it’s really beautiful that they too part at the end of the story without knowing when or if they will ever see each other again because they have duties and responsibilities that are incompatible. the love saved them both and still was not enough but it matters so much that it was there.
the like actual plot was kind of stupid lmao like killing galbatorix with magically enforced empathy is so silly and it wasn’t executed very effectively either. but idrc i never cared for the main story anyway so the galbatorix stuff was never going to matter to me. i reckon this was like a solid 6/10 artificial score inflation from nostalgia merchanting.
fave lines:
As he was about to leave, she said, “Murtagh.”
He paused and turned to regard her.
She hesitated for a moment, then mustered her courage and said, “Why?” She thought he understood her meaning: Why her? Why save her, and now why try to rescue her? She had guessed at the answer, but she wanted to hear him say it.
He stared at her for the longest while, and then, in a low, hard voice, he said, “You know why.”
twisted love & twisted games - ana huang
so the thing is that i really love jade distinguin. and i would let her lead me to places i wouldn’t go with a gun. and i heard that she is the generally accepted fancast for one of the characters in this series. and that is how i ended up here. these books are not good. this is not a place of honour. this is definitional hetslop. but i will still finish the series i just need some time to recover because i’m like being assaulted by the hetsloppery let me absorb some nutrients and rebalance my head and prepare myself for some flagrant misrepresentation of lawyers in the next book although i think/hope it will be my favourite.
twisted love
this book is so bad it’s kind of awesome. it’s grumpy x sunshine trope (and also brother’s best friend trope) and you can tell it’s grumpy x sunshine because alex’s pet name for ava is literally sunshine. but like the grumpy guy is literally a mafia boss who kills people despite being ostensibly a normal human guy. like alex is a real estate developer but ahuang writes him like he’s a vampire or faerie or some other kind of supernatural being on a generational vengeance quest to chessmaster the gruesome downfall of his family’s murderers but once again i must emphasise he is a normal human man in his twenties. he’s like a wattpad self insert fic sasuke really. ava is fine, kind of nothing but she does have an absolutely insane tragic backstory involving her dad engineering her mum’s suicide and trying to murder ava twice leading to trauma-induced amnesia about her childhood and a debilitating phobia of bodies of water (which btw leads to amazing lines like “I wished my family didn’t like lakes so much”) because she isn’t his biological daughter.
i cannot emphasise enough how bonkers the plot is and yet nothing happens at all because ahuang really truly does not give a fuck about plot logistics outside of the romance. which is so funny because she handwaves everything that could possibly go wrong with alex having “connections” in the police/the fbi/the judiciary/the british government/genuinely everywhere. basically he is the most corrupt guy in the universe. i do like a love interest who can solve problems but it’s a bit much innit, some believable tension and stakes might be nice every now and again. alex genuinely straight up tortures and kills a couple guys in the middle of the book and not only does he face no consequences for this (fine) the narrative doesn’t gaf about it either (less fine). i don’t remember if ava ever even finds out about it but she certainly doesn’t experience any of the moral confusion one would typically expect from you know a normal person let alone a pure of heart disney princess type like ava. we can’t let the main couple go through a compelling ethical conflict of course. it’s quite disappointing because hets where the guy unrepentantly kills people and the girl finds that morally reprehensible can navigate their way to a successful happy endgame see eg jung/seol in cheese in the trap (greatest het romance of all time?) and irial/leslie and niall/leslie in wicked lovely. and that process is fun to read about! i love clashing worldviews and it would have made a much better third act breakup inciter than what we actually got.
just some shockingly juvenile writing considering how much sex they have. there is so much sex in this book and it is so bad. ahuang writes some of the least sexy descriptions of arousal ever like to the point where i have medical concerns about how much omega slick her heroines are producing at like the slightest eye contact and the obsessive focus on mohs 10 nipples. i didn’t really find the relationship between ava and alex believable or interesting HOWEVER credit where it is due i found the scenes of alex teaching ava how to swim / overcoming her hydrophobia quite touching. i did not like pretty much any other interaction they had, alex’s tortured domineering alpha thing gets old pretty quickly but on the bright side it’s sort of funny how totally tonally inappropriate it is for the normal university setting. it helps that the book is written in alternating povs so we actually do get access to alex’s internal monologue, not because his thoughts are interesting to read but because it makes it much funnier to see his Twisted Fucking Cycle Path chuuni bullshit from the inside.
can i say also that i was blindsided by the choice to introduce ava’s brother josh in the first few pages by having him pick up the phone to ava while having sex with another woman. like what. he is a crazy overprotective siscon type whose idea of being crazy overprotective is making his bff alex move in next door to ava to surveil her while he’s overseas which is such a manufactured setup i could literally see ahuang’s hand moving the pieces into place. this in combination with every non-romance-related conflict being fixed offscreen by alex’s miscellaneous shadowy connections is generally the biggest issue this book has on a craft level. every plot point is SO laboriously and wackily contrived, ahuang clearly had certain tropey scenarios she wanted to write and then worked backwards to figure out how to get there but didn’t want to work that hard so she kind of just shrugged and went well it happened because of a dare or something. this was so egregious in the engineering of ava and alex’s ~growing closer~ interactions which occur because ava’s quirky best friend jules is like [quirkily] WHAT IF you systematically tried to do some strange shit to see if you can elicit variously enumerated human emotions out of alex EG sadness, happiness, jealousy(<- BE SERIOUS)? and it really is just like why would a person ever suggest this. and why would a person ever agree to do this.
anyway i think josh and alex had more chemi than alex and ava not even having fujo goggles on i think alex’s betrayal of josh was more emotionally effective than alex’s betrayal of ava because josh and alex were friends for so much longer. like look at this:
like they really loved each other damn!! you two should leave ava and jules alone and quarantine your problems and issues with each other.
the third act miscommunication induced breakup was annoying as hell although i did appreciate that ahuang took an additional step beyond “in order to save ava’s life alex lies to the bad guys that he was just using ava as a pawn in his revenge plot and doesn’t love her and ava believes him blindly” to “ava clocks that alex was lying to save her life but alex doubles down to push her away because he thinks he is harming her by staying in her life”, which is marginally less stupid. i would have respected him more if he stuck to his decision and stayed away for good unfortunately he regrets his actions instantly and decides to make it ava’s problem. this was approximately where i fully lost my patience with alex and was praying on alex/ava’s downfall even though i knew they were going to reunite due to the unbreakable power of true love or whatever.
cheered when ava moved to london post-breakup to pursue her career. frowned when alex quit his job to follow her to london and literally stalk her around for a year while she decided whether or not she wanted to let him back in like ok alex cullen… good on ava for making him grovel for a year though. obviously the job quitting has zero lasting consequences because alex is immediately reinstated as ceo of vague sinister real estate conglomerate upon returning to america after wearing ava down enough via diabolical karaoke session at her photography exhibition (this had me in hysterics like WHAT DO YOU MEAN… and everyone else just had to stand there listening to alex soulfully but like presumably coolly and awesomely mike wazowski his way through some Pleaseeee Take Me Back I’m Begging ballad) to get back with him. i mean congrats to ava for pet sociopath acquisition which is normally something i cheer for but Are you sure this is the one you want girl he’s a bit of a cringe loser.
i guess i’ll rate this 3/10 because i think ultimately this was so bad it was fun but i distinctly remember not having fun at a lot of parts, maybe most of the parts even. so actually i probably didn’t have fun but i saw the cave wall shadows of having fun or something.
fave line: His presence obliterated everything around him until he was the only thing left standing.
this is princess x bodyguard trope but god i wish it wasn’t. technically speaking this is better written than twisted love although that is not a high bar to clear. it’s less insane plotwise so a little less fun to read—basically bridget’s older brother the crown prince of eldorra surprise abdicates so he can marry his commoner girlfriend as there is a law that requires the monarch to be married to another noble, which forces bridget who was planning to stay in the us as eldorra’s ambassador to come home and suddenly take on crown princess duties. and her bodyguard rhys is there, unfortunately. but it did manage moments of genuine emotional gravitas unrelated to the romance that made me misty eyed and i always enjoy courtly intrigue.
i really like bridget, for sure more than ava, though i am probably biased due to association with jades who i have loved before. but i thought bridget’s journey from reluctant princess yanked back to a home she doesn’t fully recognise since she’s spent so much time away to genuine devotion to her people and wanting to be a just and compassionate influence on governance within the jurisdictional limits of eldorra’s constitutional monarchy(?) was lovely and touching even if i am a bit concerned about the separation of powers. bridget has a coherent and emotionally compelling love vs duty internal conflict that culminates in her choosing duty, which is my favourite trait in a 0 as i am always saying. OBVIOUSLY this has no actual consequences and is solved mostly offscreen with mild war crimes it’s an ahuang book but it matters that bridget was willing to give up love and happiness for the sake of a greater good. that’s her royal highness the people’s princess!
on the other hand i hate rhys so much it is unreal. when i finished the book i was hyperbolically calling him the worst love interest i’ve had the displeasure of reading and let me tell you i have read some absolute bullshit and ok maybe he’s not as bad as like the christian greys of the world but he sucks so bad. name one redeeming quality about him other than being 6’5’’. quickly. he’s such a boring uncharming cringe inflexible daddy dom type and he has no concrete power or influence so he adds no tangible value to her life either. i truly don’t understand what bridget liked in him. i spent 70% of the book being like GET A JOBBB (a different job which does not inherently require close physical proximity to bridget) STAY AWAY FROM HERRRRRR.
the sex in this book is so bad it makes the sex in twisted love look masterful. on top of the same unappealing descriptions of biologically improbable quantities of slick and industrial grade drill bit nipples the unnegotiated d/s was making me so mad i started doubting whether i even enjoy the trope. like i am the target audience for this kind of het dynamic i love maledom/femsub i have a very forgiving tolerance for slop if the dynamic hits. and yet. i think the reason it was pissing me off is that bridget is such a high profile public figure who is already in such a precarious position due to coming back to eldorra with pretty negative pr / the image of being an irresponsible, immature and americanised party girl who isn’t a Real Eldorran capable of ruling. and she still had to deal with the godzilla of institutional misogyny too but ahuang wasn’t too interested in exploring all that so there’s really only like 1 guy who actually thinks bridget should also abdicate in favour of a man and he gets dealt with pretty conclusively with a light spot of blackmail that of course has no consequences. also he’s rhys’s secret dad but idrgaf about that. bridget’s main political rival turns out to have just been gaming and was actually trying to reverse psychology support her or something the whole time and also was rhys’s secret half brother as well but again idrgaf about that.
anyway bridget had SO MUCH to lose if any of her political enemies found out she was having illicit liaisons with her bodyguard. if rhys really cared about her he would have firmly refused to fuck her despite the attraction or whatever. and they were sooo reckless about it omfg they were having semi public sex everywhereeee can you both THINK for a second. ahuang’s porn writing skill issue aside repression ans celibacy would in fact would have been hotter than any of the sex they actually had, i am always saying that not having sex is the real having sex.
however i really enjoyed the plotline of bridget dealing with the looming necessity of entering a political marriage to legally enable her ascension to the throne. honestly i think political marriages should be the attempted solution for pretty much everything they may not actually solve anything but at the very least they are fun. i liked her prospective fiance whose name i have forgotten being a perfectly lovely guy who she just simply has zero chemi with but is willing to marry anyway if it will prevent the throne from falling into the dastardly clutches of the evil conservative faction, and i liked that the prospective fiance in question was in pretty much the same situation because he was also in love with a different woman but was willing to put duty first and marry bridget. they would have had such a beautiful loveless strategic alliance fake marriage while committing mad adultery on the side. matter of fact i wish this is the route the book took but alas we get blackmail induced statutory reform and prince consort rhys instead.
there is probably more i could say but it’s pissing me off just thinking back on this book so i’m ending this review here. 2/10 and those 2 points are all for my hardworking princesa jadebridget. rhys has got to die my final message goodbye.
no fave line because the only thing i apparently felt compelled to highlight was: Andreas snaked through the crowd, looking like, well, a snake.
with the annotation: this writing prowess
little eyes - samanta schweblin (dnf)
book club pick that left me ambiently pissed off and i ended up passively dnf’ing at 50% just out of lack of desire to continue going. took me ages to even get that far because the combination unusual story structure and strange scifi concept with no romance was throwing me off and it’s too Literary to really hold my interest and also the women and girls are constantly being subjected to shocking sexual situations like um okay when you’re at the function and can’t help noticing misogyny bleeding through the cracks etc. i didn’t have a good time. the central conceit is there are these robotic pets called kentukis which are being remote controlled by strangers somewhere else in the world. i just genuinely could not suspend my disbelief as to why anyone would want to engage with the kentuki system as an owner or as a controller like what is anyone on either side of this transaction gaining. why would a normal person let a random guy in their house considering that the random guy is explicitly there to voyeuristically observe them or they wouldn’t have bought the connection licence in the first place. get a roomba if you want a robotic pet you can’t really communicate with?
i understand a little bit more why someone might be curious enough about other people’s lives or perverted enough (but a lot of the kentuki controllers are just normal guys as well) to be a kentuki on the other end but it’s just so weird and this is what like diml vlogs and stalking real estate listings and google streetview and such are for already like you can already insert yourself into other people’s lives and be nosy in so many different ways i don’t understand what gap in the market the kentuki is meant to fill. you just can’t convince me this would have been a successful product launch with any demand let alone that it made it past the first regulatory hurdle.
like i’m generally quite willing to go where a story leads me but when it’s otherwise so grounded in the real world i need more believable worldbuilding to support something even if it is clearly intended to function as a metaphor first and foremost. i think i’d be more forgiving if it was magic rather than tech. i am entirely aware that the point of the kentuki tech is to explore themes of like voyeurism and internet-enabled connection despite anonymity and communication without physical interaction/language and whatever but it was so annoying though. and again why was every woman/girl embroiled in some weird sexual shit with the kentukis.
the book is a series of mostly unconnected vignettes though some of the storylines continue throughout. but the cast is like a revolving door so it’s hard to get invested in any particular guy enough to want to read more about what happens to them especially because i think the kentuki thing is so stupid so i don’t really care about the hidden identity / noncommunication induced tension. i really don’t care about normal people having normal people problems with a little bit of robot set dressing. i think this has made me realise i much prefer hard scifi to soft scifi or at least something where the scifi element has literally any impact on the worldbuilding. since the kentuki functions as a symbol for things that already exist irl it might as well not be scifi at all and then it’s like well why am i reading this then.
i did think the vignette where a caretaker at a retirement home buys a couple of kentukis as companions for the elderly residents who immediately kill themselves upon realising where they are was probably the most effective. but this doesn’t really mean anything. maybe scheblin manages to pull it all together in the second half of the book but i don’t really care enough to find out.
the poet empress - shen tao
did you read she who became the sun and wish that it was midder? did you read the cruel prince and wish that it was chinese and had no romance and was also midder? did you read the poppy war and wish that it had lower highs and higher lows ie that it was also also midder? if so, this may be the book for you!
this is a book about wei yin, a peasant girl who marries as a concubine into the royal family and has to rapidly learn the game of thrones and how to write magic poetry with the intent to kill her evil sadistic husband the crown prince terren before he becomes king and dooms the country with his evil sadistic ways. overall i think the book was fine. i am not mad that i read it and it is very fastpaced so easy to get through (too fastpaced maybe, it could have benefitted from lingering on moments of emotional significance a little longer) but i will probably never think about it again. i haven’t had a lot of luck with east asia inspired fantasy but this is probably one of the better ones i’ve read.
it is not a romantasy, i believe op has described it as an anti-romantasy? so i knew what i was getting into but i wasn’t happy about it because the romance literally was hitting lmao i think that terren is meant to be such an awful vicious abuser that even once wei yin learns about the extreme trauma he went through and terren obviously starts to fall in love with wei yin and she understands him well enough to love him in the newtype sense (absence of romance is the most romantic thing in the universe etc) the harm he did to her and will do to the country cannot be forgiven and she kills him anyway. like it leans very heavily on the typical dark romantasy setup of a cruel prince who is softened by the heroine and ultimately “redeemed” by love but there is no love or redemption, only the killing knife. unfortunately i like the typical dark romantasy setup played straight so i was pretty mad about the bait. like terren tortures wei yin to the point where she is repeatedly almost bleeding to death and op was obviously writing all of this to be horrifying and not romantic but i did unfortunately find parts of it romantic anyway once he started shifting into lima syndromed pet sociopath mode because wei yin’s gambit was working đ
one of the most compelling (and, to me, romantic) scenes in the whole book is after wei yin crosses a personal moral boundary by framing a loyal eunuch who had helped her before because he was threatening to expose her secrets so she’s already in a huge amount of turmoil and then the next morning she walks outside and her entire household has been absolutely slaughtered by terren body parts everywhere she has to put beloved handmaiden friend out of her misery and pretend she’s grateful to terren for getting rid of the traitors in her retinue. obviously she’s super upset and angry about it and he’s like Are you mad:( and she’s like [struggling not to throw up and or ruin long term plans by trying to murder him in revenge on the spot] Not really and he’s like You didn’t like that?:( and she’s like Not really and he tries to cheer her up by granting her a month off to go see her family and take a bunch of famine relief to them. Like brother you did just kill and dismember all her friends i would say she probably didn’t like that. but my heart fluttered a bit anyway.
i do think that extreme power imbalances and murderous intent including murder attempts can be successfully navigated in a happy endgame romance. i do actively enjoy het romance where the guy holds all of the institutional power and leverages it to inflict tangible and repeated harm on the girl, although this is predicated on the girl being able to exert increasing amounts of power and influence over the guy on a personal level and/or (preferably and) making her own play at obtaining institutional power because while i love a fixed power dynamic it needs some kind of balance for long term equilibrium and i find societally enforced extreme misogyny upsetting to read about. i do even like it when the girl kills the guy but only after a real reciprocated romance is entered which means they need believable reasons to be in love even if they don’t like each other. but that was not the story op wanted to tell and that’s fine it just meant that i liked it less.
as an average newtype enjoyer i liked the premise of wei yin being forced to understand terren as a person because the only way to kill him is with a specific poem-spell that can only be created and used by somebody who loves the target enough to completely understand their heart in a metaphorical sense thus being able to physically reach it through the figurative-literal bridging power of poetry, it’s a great chicken/egg bind and dovetails nicely into the idea of love / empathy / perfect understanding not being enough. wei yin having to detective her way through various people’s biased and conflicting accounts and memories of terren to frankenstein together the truth about who he really is was fun because it reminded me of mystery stories i have liked before. i think it’s important that she was able to fully understand and know him and all the trauma that turned him into the sart of like an evil porson he is today and acknowledge that he was a victim of immense suffering but that doesn’t cancel out the immense suffering he has caused and will continue to cause, and still make the choice to kill him.
things i would have liked to see more of:
- wei yin’s interiority. the narration never really gave me a good sense of her emotional state, she’s frustratingly closed off in a way that i am not even sure is meant to be intentional but even if it was it’s like ok why am i being locked out of the protagonist’s head, i have no interest in seeing her narrate a series of events with no particular feelings or thoughts about them or even any real indication that she is repressing feelings or thoughts. so, so much telling and summary montage narration recaps. i will say that i did have a decently clear picture of her motivations though, she always acted in ways that made sense even if she pissed me off sometimes due to her unfamiliarity with political manoeuvring (not her fault but it was annoying), and the progression of her goals through the story felt pretty natural.
- wei yin’s relationships with Literally Anybody including terren. a lot of relationship development seemed to happen off-screen or is summarised which is not satisfying at all especially considering how vital her relationship with terren is. i guess she did successfully lima syndrome him into developing genuine regard for her but this is exactly the kind of thing that we should have been able to see onscreen instead of an offhand Yeah he def cares enough about me now to not have me executed without speaking to me first. like… he does? can i see? i also really wanted wei yin to have more of a relationship with the other concubines although i understand that her isolation in that regard was more intentional due to court politics. however she was cultivating a relationship with silian on purpose and i definitely would have liked to actually see that friendship/mentorship/alliance/narrative parallelism and TRUST develop so that silian’s betrayal would then hit harder. kind of the biggest disappointment of the book. appreciated the kissing lessons yuri fanservice though.
- the ghosts… why were there suddenly ghosts revealed at like the ¾ mark i would have liked to see it brought up earlier so it felt less like a tearjerker gimmick when wei yin first sees the ghost of terren as a child. bit of a heavyhanded image ngl like ok i get it his innocent younger self is dead.
- for a book titled ‘the poet empress’ that features a poetry-based magic system there sure is very little actual poetry in this book. like i don’t necessarily want eragon-style bad poetry songficcing interludes but the writing style is shockingly utilitarian and unlyrical. it’s like the antithesis of bunny lol says too much too directly. i also wanted wei yin to do more magic herself instead of the majority of the worldbuilding coming from her reading maro’s diary entries about magic that he and terren used to do.
i also think that the ending was a bit too giftwrappedly neat like well yay education and literacy for women and the end of the famine for the country and an emperor that is not evil probably. how nice that everything worked out for the best all at the same time. good for them. 5/10 it was fine.
fave line: … the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them. I did not know what else to call it, if not love.
inheritance - christopher paolini
started my reread sometime last year but i left the physical book (which i preordered at dymocks so i would have it immediately upon release btw i was a real eragonhead) at my parents’ place so i’ve been listening on and off to the audiobook while i walk around. it wasn’t good but you know what it wasn’t bad. at one point i was even looking forward to eragon’s pov chapters because the vroengard adventures were fun and i was getting really scared by nasuada’s literal torture chamber pov and roran was as usual boring as hell. it’s the most generic fantasy story ever but i’ve got to give cpaolini his flowers for having the guts to make eragon’s endgame Leaving Forever And Never Coming Back. my favourite protag narrative conclusion is literal or metaphorical apotheosis because i love when a protag moves further and further away from their loved ones throughout their hero’s journey even as they work to protect those loved ones until they become so distant they are on another plane entirely and can no longer return. permanent separation and severance from humanity in the course of saving humanity my beloveddd.
so i really appreciated seeing that here even though i’ve never cared much for eragon, and i also really appreciated that no romance ever eventuated between eragon and arya. i think cpaolini got better at writing arya as a person with motivations and feelings separate from what eragon wants from her or projects onto her throughout the series, and it was a pleasant surprise that eragon acknowledged and respected arya’s boundaries instead of being annoyingly pushy and making his crush her problem like he did in eragon/eldest. like i was genuinely touched by the ending where eragon and arya part forever, probably the warmest i ever felt about their relationship dynamic and the most romantic i thought they got. i could believe that by the end of the series eragon had grown into someone that arya respected and considered a true and dear friend.
the murtagh/nasuada tinhet so buzzy like yes the nasuada torture scenes were straight landmines because i am really easily scared but the lotus eater dream galbatorix gives her where she’s happily married to murtagh i ate delicious although 4 kids in 8 years made me die like get off her omg. it’s really beautiful that murtagh’s love for and desire to save nasuada was what saved him too because it altered him so deeply it changed his true name. it’s really beautiful that they too part at the end of the story without knowing when or if they will ever see each other again because they have duties and responsibilities that are incompatible. the love saved them both and still was not enough but it matters so much that it was there.
the like actual plot was kind of stupid lmao like killing galbatorix with magically enforced empathy is so silly and it wasn’t executed very effectively either. but idrc i never cared for the main story anyway so the galbatorix stuff was never going to matter to me. i reckon this was like a solid 6/10 artificial score inflation from nostalgia merchanting.
fave lines:
As he was about to leave, she said, “Murtagh.”
He paused and turned to regard her.
She hesitated for a moment, then mustered her courage and said, “Why?” She thought he understood her meaning: Why her? Why save her, and now why try to rescue her? She had guessed at the answer, but she wanted to hear him say it.
He stared at her for the longest while, and then, in a low, hard voice, he said, “You know why.”
- editor absolutely should have cut out those explanatory sentences on what nasuada meant by “why” bc they drastically weaken the passage but the “you know why” still hitttt.
twisted love & twisted games - ana huang
so the thing is that i really love jade distinguin. and i would let her lead me to places i wouldn’t go with a gun. and i heard that she is the generally accepted fancast for one of the characters in this series. and that is how i ended up here. these books are not good. this is not a place of honour. this is definitional hetslop. but i will still finish the series i just need some time to recover because i’m like being assaulted by the hetsloppery let me absorb some nutrients and rebalance my head and prepare myself for some flagrant misrepresentation of lawyers in the next book although i think/hope it will be my favourite.
twisted love
this book is so bad it’s kind of awesome. it’s grumpy x sunshine trope (and also brother’s best friend trope) and you can tell it’s grumpy x sunshine because alex’s pet name for ava is literally sunshine. but like the grumpy guy is literally a mafia boss who kills people despite being ostensibly a normal human guy. like alex is a real estate developer but ahuang writes him like he’s a vampire or faerie or some other kind of supernatural being on a generational vengeance quest to chessmaster the gruesome downfall of his family’s murderers but once again i must emphasise he is a normal human man in his twenties. he’s like a wattpad self insert fic sasuke really. ava is fine, kind of nothing but she does have an absolutely insane tragic backstory involving her dad engineering her mum’s suicide and trying to murder ava twice leading to trauma-induced amnesia about her childhood and a debilitating phobia of bodies of water (which btw leads to amazing lines like “I wished my family didn’t like lakes so much”) because she isn’t his biological daughter.
i cannot emphasise enough how bonkers the plot is and yet nothing happens at all because ahuang really truly does not give a fuck about plot logistics outside of the romance. which is so funny because she handwaves everything that could possibly go wrong with alex having “connections” in the police/the fbi/the judiciary/the british government/genuinely everywhere. basically he is the most corrupt guy in the universe. i do like a love interest who can solve problems but it’s a bit much innit, some believable tension and stakes might be nice every now and again. alex genuinely straight up tortures and kills a couple guys in the middle of the book and not only does he face no consequences for this (fine) the narrative doesn’t gaf about it either (less fine). i don’t remember if ava ever even finds out about it but she certainly doesn’t experience any of the moral confusion one would typically expect from you know a normal person let alone a pure of heart disney princess type like ava. we can’t let the main couple go through a compelling ethical conflict of course. it’s quite disappointing because hets where the guy unrepentantly kills people and the girl finds that morally reprehensible can navigate their way to a successful happy endgame see eg jung/seol in cheese in the trap (greatest het romance of all time?) and irial/leslie and niall/leslie in wicked lovely. and that process is fun to read about! i love clashing worldviews and it would have made a much better third act breakup inciter than what we actually got.
just some shockingly juvenile writing considering how much sex they have. there is so much sex in this book and it is so bad. ahuang writes some of the least sexy descriptions of arousal ever like to the point where i have medical concerns about how much omega slick her heroines are producing at like the slightest eye contact and the obsessive focus on mohs 10 nipples. i didn’t really find the relationship between ava and alex believable or interesting HOWEVER credit where it is due i found the scenes of alex teaching ava how to swim / overcoming her hydrophobia quite touching. i did not like pretty much any other interaction they had, alex’s tortured domineering alpha thing gets old pretty quickly but on the bright side it’s sort of funny how totally tonally inappropriate it is for the normal university setting. it helps that the book is written in alternating povs so we actually do get access to alex’s internal monologue, not because his thoughts are interesting to read but because it makes it much funnier to see his Twisted Fucking Cycle Path chuuni bullshit from the inside.
can i say also that i was blindsided by the choice to introduce ava’s brother josh in the first few pages by having him pick up the phone to ava while having sex with another woman. like what. he is a crazy overprotective siscon type whose idea of being crazy overprotective is making his bff alex move in next door to ava to surveil her while he’s overseas which is such a manufactured setup i could literally see ahuang’s hand moving the pieces into place. this in combination with every non-romance-related conflict being fixed offscreen by alex’s miscellaneous shadowy connections is generally the biggest issue this book has on a craft level. every plot point is SO laboriously and wackily contrived, ahuang clearly had certain tropey scenarios she wanted to write and then worked backwards to figure out how to get there but didn’t want to work that hard so she kind of just shrugged and went well it happened because of a dare or something. this was so egregious in the engineering of ava and alex’s ~growing closer~ interactions which occur because ava’s quirky best friend jules is like [quirkily] WHAT IF you systematically tried to do some strange shit to see if you can elicit variously enumerated human emotions out of alex EG sadness, happiness, jealousy(<- BE SERIOUS)? and it really is just like why would a person ever suggest this. and why would a person ever agree to do this.
anyway i think josh and alex had more chemi than alex and ava not even having fujo goggles on i think alex’s betrayal of josh was more emotionally effective than alex’s betrayal of ava because josh and alex were friends for so much longer. like look at this:
“You were my best friend,” he repeated, his voice cracking on the last word. Another, altogether different type of pain lanced through me.
like they really loved each other damn!! you two should leave ava and jules alone and quarantine your problems and issues with each other.
the third act miscommunication induced breakup was annoying as hell although i did appreciate that ahuang took an additional step beyond “in order to save ava’s life alex lies to the bad guys that he was just using ava as a pawn in his revenge plot and doesn’t love her and ava believes him blindly” to “ava clocks that alex was lying to save her life but alex doubles down to push her away because he thinks he is harming her by staying in her life”, which is marginally less stupid. i would have respected him more if he stuck to his decision and stayed away for good unfortunately he regrets his actions instantly and decides to make it ava’s problem. this was approximately where i fully lost my patience with alex and was praying on alex/ava’s downfall even though i knew they were going to reunite due to the unbreakable power of true love or whatever.
cheered when ava moved to london post-breakup to pursue her career. frowned when alex quit his job to follow her to london and literally stalk her around for a year while she decided whether or not she wanted to let him back in like ok alex cullen… good on ava for making him grovel for a year though. obviously the job quitting has zero lasting consequences because alex is immediately reinstated as ceo of vague sinister real estate conglomerate upon returning to america after wearing ava down enough via diabolical karaoke session at her photography exhibition (this had me in hysterics like WHAT DO YOU MEAN… and everyone else just had to stand there listening to alex soulfully but like presumably coolly and awesomely mike wazowski his way through some Pleaseeee Take Me Back I’m Begging ballad) to get back with him. i mean congrats to ava for pet sociopath acquisition which is normally something i cheer for but Are you sure this is the one you want girl he’s a bit of a cringe loser.
i guess i’ll rate this 3/10 because i think ultimately this was so bad it was fun but i distinctly remember not having fun at a lot of parts, maybe most of the parts even. so actually i probably didn’t have fun but i saw the cave wall shadows of having fun or something.
fave line: His presence obliterated everything around him until he was the only thing left standing.
- SORRYYYYYY I TOOK THE BAITTTTTT but i will whack ahuang for realising she cooked and shamelessly recycling this it hit the first time but it was less and less good the subsequent times.
this is princess x bodyguard trope but god i wish it wasn’t. technically speaking this is better written than twisted love although that is not a high bar to clear. it’s less insane plotwise so a little less fun to read—basically bridget’s older brother the crown prince of eldorra surprise abdicates so he can marry his commoner girlfriend as there is a law that requires the monarch to be married to another noble, which forces bridget who was planning to stay in the us as eldorra’s ambassador to come home and suddenly take on crown princess duties. and her bodyguard rhys is there, unfortunately. but it did manage moments of genuine emotional gravitas unrelated to the romance that made me misty eyed and i always enjoy courtly intrigue.
i really like bridget, for sure more than ava, though i am probably biased due to association with jades who i have loved before. but i thought bridget’s journey from reluctant princess yanked back to a home she doesn’t fully recognise since she’s spent so much time away to genuine devotion to her people and wanting to be a just and compassionate influence on governance within the jurisdictional limits of eldorra’s constitutional monarchy(?) was lovely and touching even if i am a bit concerned about the separation of powers. bridget has a coherent and emotionally compelling love vs duty internal conflict that culminates in her choosing duty, which is my favourite trait in a 0 as i am always saying. OBVIOUSLY this has no actual consequences and is solved mostly offscreen with mild war crimes it’s an ahuang book but it matters that bridget was willing to give up love and happiness for the sake of a greater good. that’s her royal highness the people’s princess!
on the other hand i hate rhys so much it is unreal. when i finished the book i was hyperbolically calling him the worst love interest i’ve had the displeasure of reading and let me tell you i have read some absolute bullshit and ok maybe he’s not as bad as like the christian greys of the world but he sucks so bad. name one redeeming quality about him other than being 6’5’’. quickly. he’s such a boring uncharming cringe inflexible daddy dom type and he has no concrete power or influence so he adds no tangible value to her life either. i truly don’t understand what bridget liked in him. i spent 70% of the book being like GET A JOBBB (a different job which does not inherently require close physical proximity to bridget) STAY AWAY FROM HERRRRRR.
the sex in this book is so bad it makes the sex in twisted love look masterful. on top of the same unappealing descriptions of biologically improbable quantities of slick and industrial grade drill bit nipples the unnegotiated d/s was making me so mad i started doubting whether i even enjoy the trope. like i am the target audience for this kind of het dynamic i love maledom/femsub i have a very forgiving tolerance for slop if the dynamic hits. and yet. i think the reason it was pissing me off is that bridget is such a high profile public figure who is already in such a precarious position due to coming back to eldorra with pretty negative pr / the image of being an irresponsible, immature and americanised party girl who isn’t a Real Eldorran capable of ruling. and she still had to deal with the godzilla of institutional misogyny too but ahuang wasn’t too interested in exploring all that so there’s really only like 1 guy who actually thinks bridget should also abdicate in favour of a man and he gets dealt with pretty conclusively with a light spot of blackmail that of course has no consequences. also he’s rhys’s secret dad but idrgaf about that. bridget’s main political rival turns out to have just been gaming and was actually trying to reverse psychology support her or something the whole time and also was rhys’s secret half brother as well but again idrgaf about that.
anyway bridget had SO MUCH to lose if any of her political enemies found out she was having illicit liaisons with her bodyguard. if rhys really cared about her he would have firmly refused to fuck her despite the attraction or whatever. and they were sooo reckless about it omfg they were having semi public sex everywhereeee can you both THINK for a second. ahuang’s porn writing skill issue aside repression ans celibacy would in fact would have been hotter than any of the sex they actually had, i am always saying that not having sex is the real having sex.
however i really enjoyed the plotline of bridget dealing with the looming necessity of entering a political marriage to legally enable her ascension to the throne. honestly i think political marriages should be the attempted solution for pretty much everything they may not actually solve anything but at the very least they are fun. i liked her prospective fiance whose name i have forgotten being a perfectly lovely guy who she just simply has zero chemi with but is willing to marry anyway if it will prevent the throne from falling into the dastardly clutches of the evil conservative faction, and i liked that the prospective fiance in question was in pretty much the same situation because he was also in love with a different woman but was willing to put duty first and marry bridget. they would have had such a beautiful loveless strategic alliance fake marriage while committing mad adultery on the side. matter of fact i wish this is the route the book took but alas we get blackmail induced statutory reform and prince consort rhys instead.
there is probably more i could say but it’s pissing me off just thinking back on this book so i’m ending this review here. 2/10 and those 2 points are all for my hardworking princesa jadebridget. rhys has got to die my final message goodbye.
no fave line because the only thing i apparently felt compelled to highlight was: Andreas snaked through the crowd, looking like, well, a snake.
with the annotation: this writing prowess
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Date: 2026-05-16 03:02 pm (UTC)but i do hope you have a good or at least worthwhile time with the poet empress though! i think it has some interesting things to say even if i dont think it warrants the glowing praise ive been seeing around and i would be super interested to hear your thoughts :) also the vertical drama comparison for ahuang is perfectttt ctfu it really is the most insane and tragic shit happening constantly but none of it means anything.