Welcome to Litsy!

My stalwart companion as I reread ONCE A ROGUE. He‘s so red in the smokey light! I filtered him a bit to capture the colour I actually saw.

The book‘s still great. I love the way these characters bounce off each other, and Allie Therin‘s prose practically reads itself. I open my ereader and suddenly half an hour‘s gone by. I needed this, especially after I bailed on an opaque contemporary fantasy last night.

Such a cozy, fun addition to the series.

Where I talk about the importance of Dragons, with thanks to Tansy Rayner Roberts for her illuminating tome, The Season of Dragons.
https://www.suzs-space.com/the-season-of-dragons-by-tansy-rayner-roberts/

It was a slog. The author was trying to fit way too much modern messaging that the story felt disjointed and not the fun adventure I was hoping for. The parts that were fun were short lived and I needed more of them. If this was a modern woman dropped into the time period (a la Outlander) this could have been really fun. There was nothing wrong with the messages themselves, but the execution really bogged down the momentum of the story-2.5 stars.

My husband and I finished this one over the weekend. It took longer than usual because we took turns reading it to each other, but it was worth the wait. Another excellent book about Emily and Wendell! The plots in this series continue to get more and more complex. I‘d say this was three times more complex as the first one. So much happens in this one. I will definitely have to reread someday. Highly recommended!

Delightful!!

Well. I'm not quite sure what I think of this, ultimately. The bad guys here are Welsh, in the period of Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, and have established basically a little Welsh commune in medieval style. The daughter of a Victorian clergyman is the heroine (though her mother was Jewish, she is also very Anglican Christian). It all... reads badly. There isn't any outright outage I can quote, I'm just uncomfortable with all of it. 1/2

I'm fairly sure that the Welsh guy complaining of the way the English treat the Welsh is going to turn out to be the bad guy here, for all that his words are portrayed as sounding reasonable. I'm getting very very uncomfortable.

It's also definitely a look to have a Victorian clergyman's daughter visit Wales and complain about Welsh people not being religious, given Brad y Llyfrau Gleision was 1847.

Welp, a character just got announced as “Arthur, Prince of Gwynedd“, and... this is a definite choice. This might be where I depart from this series, depending on how things go. Who knows, maybe it'll be amazing and not weird about “Wild Wales“ (quote) in a book set in the Victorian period, but I'm bracing to be severely exoticised and, thanks, I hate it.