Book Review: Winter’s Orbit
May. 6th, 2021 08:06 amFriends, Romans, countrymen, on the advice of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants I read Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, and I can’t contain my glee.
This book evidently started out as fanfic, and you can still see this origin in the delicious emotion-soaked tropiness of it all. The book kicks off when minor royal Prince Kiem is summoned by the Emperor, who informs him that he needs to go through an arranged marriage in order to secure a treaty for the Empire. To whom? Jainan, who lost his previous husband Taam just a month ago. When’s the wedding? Oh, tomorrow. There’s only a month left till a Very Important treaty needs to be signed, so there is no time for the betrotheds to get to know each other before the wedding.
Kiem is low-key appalled. Not only does he barely know Jainan, but Jainan and Taam were one of the golden couples of the tabloids, so he’s sure Taam’s recent death has left Jainan a deeply grieving widower. Still, it’s for the Empire, so he tries to make the best of it… and so does Jainan, although Kiem can tell Jainan’s far from happy about it.
Little does he know that Jainan’s stiff formality is not an expression of grief, but a behavior pattern that he learned in trying to deal with Taam. Jainan and Taam were NOT, in fact, a golden couple deeply in love; instead, Jainan has for the last five years been trapped in a marriage with an abusive husband, who told him at every turn that the abuse was Jainan’s own fault for being inadequate, leaving Jainan convinced he’s going to fuck up his relationship with Kiem as well!
“YESSSSS A BAD BOYFRIEND,” I screamed, because there is nothing that I love better than watching male characters manipulated and emotionally downtrodden by their horrible boyfriends and/or husbands.
There are a decent number of flashbacks about Jainan’s traumatic past (I of course would have enjoyed ten more chapters of it, but that’s me), but the focus of the book is really much more on Jainan finding his own feet again now that he’s not being constantly bombarded by messages that he is useless and unlovable, and slowly coming to trust Kiem and then to love him.
Kiem, meanwhile, is attracted to Jainan right out of the gate, and swiftly head over heels. His journey is more about coming to understand Jainan better as Jainan very slowly lets his guard down, and finally realizing just why Jainan was so intensely guarded in the first place.
There’s also a wider political plot - it turns out that Taam was involved in corruption & evil plotting as well as being awful on a personal level - but I thought this was less well-done, on the whole, than the romance. In particular, it seemed to me that the political stakes were ratcheted up too high, so the failure of Kiem and Jainan’s marriage might spell disaster for the entire empire, which is a whole lot of pressure… but also hard to take seriously. If your whole political system is built on treaty marriages, then people have to understand that these are not generally love matches, right?
However, the book is inconsistent about how seriously it takes this part of its plot, which ordinarily I would find irritating, but in this case ignoring the stakes as much as possible was clearly the right choice. It just would have been an even better choice to lower the stakes so we are not occasionally reminded that the fate of THE WHOLE GALAXY rests on their rapprochement.
At the end of the day, though, basically the political plot is a scaffold on which to hang the romance, and the romance is so delicious that the occasional creaking of that scaffolding doesn’t particularly matter.
skygiants I read Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, and I can’t contain my glee.This book evidently started out as fanfic, and you can still see this origin in the delicious emotion-soaked tropiness of it all. The book kicks off when minor royal Prince Kiem is summoned by the Emperor, who informs him that he needs to go through an arranged marriage in order to secure a treaty for the Empire. To whom? Jainan, who lost his previous husband Taam just a month ago. When’s the wedding? Oh, tomorrow. There’s only a month left till a Very Important treaty needs to be signed, so there is no time for the betrotheds to get to know each other before the wedding.
Kiem is low-key appalled. Not only does he barely know Jainan, but Jainan and Taam were one of the golden couples of the tabloids, so he’s sure Taam’s recent death has left Jainan a deeply grieving widower. Still, it’s for the Empire, so he tries to make the best of it… and so does Jainan, although Kiem can tell Jainan’s far from happy about it.
Little does he know that Jainan’s stiff formality is not an expression of grief, but a behavior pattern that he learned in trying to deal with Taam. Jainan and Taam were NOT, in fact, a golden couple deeply in love; instead, Jainan has for the last five years been trapped in a marriage with an abusive husband, who told him at every turn that the abuse was Jainan’s own fault for being inadequate, leaving Jainan convinced he’s going to fuck up his relationship with Kiem as well!
“YESSSSS A BAD BOYFRIEND,” I screamed, because there is nothing that I love better than watching male characters manipulated and emotionally downtrodden by their horrible boyfriends and/or husbands.
There are a decent number of flashbacks about Jainan’s traumatic past (I of course would have enjoyed ten more chapters of it, but that’s me), but the focus of the book is really much more on Jainan finding his own feet again now that he’s not being constantly bombarded by messages that he is useless and unlovable, and slowly coming to trust Kiem and then to love him.
Kiem, meanwhile, is attracted to Jainan right out of the gate, and swiftly head over heels. His journey is more about coming to understand Jainan better as Jainan very slowly lets his guard down, and finally realizing just why Jainan was so intensely guarded in the first place.
There’s also a wider political plot - it turns out that Taam was involved in corruption & evil plotting as well as being awful on a personal level - but I thought this was less well-done, on the whole, than the romance. In particular, it seemed to me that the political stakes were ratcheted up too high, so the failure of Kiem and Jainan’s marriage might spell disaster for the entire empire, which is a whole lot of pressure… but also hard to take seriously. If your whole political system is built on treaty marriages, then people have to understand that these are not generally love matches, right?
However, the book is inconsistent about how seriously it takes this part of its plot, which ordinarily I would find irritating, but in this case ignoring the stakes as much as possible was clearly the right choice. It just would have been an even better choice to lower the stakes so we are not occasionally reminded that the fate of THE WHOLE GALAXY rests on their rapprochement.
At the end of the day, though, basically the political plot is a scaffold on which to hang the romance, and the romance is so delicious that the occasional creaking of that scaffolding doesn’t particularly matter.
