Keira's Bookmark

Published July 2025 | 553 pages | Adult Fantasy Romance | Storygraph Page

Terminology note: fantasy romance =/= romantasy – this is a fantasy with a heavy romantic subplot, but it is fantasy first.

This review is 99.9% spoiler free – there are some slight, non-specific indications of how the book plays out in terms of character growth etc. but nothing that gives away the plot specifics!

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Review

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1. Clara (the protagonist) is so immature? I know she’s only 21, but I would expect her to be a mature 21, not a 21 that reads like 16/17? She’s been to prison; she’s been working and had caretaking responsibilities for years; she works for an organisation smuggling magic users out of the country. And yet she reads like I would expect the main character of a YA book to read at the very beginning of a series, and even then, I’d probably have complained about her as a teenager.
   
   In a way, Clara’s really naive – she still has a very black and white view of the world and struggles to accept any reality other than her own, whether her version of reality is substantiated or not. She’s also really selfish and self-important in a lot of the ways that matter, even whilst obviously caring a lot for her friends and family and claiming to care about the systemic oppression present in the world. These things annoy me in any book, but they’re more acceptable as a point zero in a YA book than in an adult book, where I expect more character depth and some basic character development to have already occurred before page 1 of the book.
   
   A great example of this is in The Incandescent – the protagonist there is 17 years older than Clara is in this book, so I definitely don’t expect as much maturity as a baseline, but I thought the “I’ve lived some of my life and grown some but I still have a long way to go” thing was done a lot better there than here, and that’s what I generally want from an adult book. The “I’ve got everything still to work out” thing works great in coming-of-age stories – in YA and maybe NA, not adult.
   
   Check out my recent review of The Incandescent here.
   
   Also, the other adults in her life treat her like a 17/18/19 year old (in a fantasy world): they give her responsibilities but not the information to make informed, autonomous decisions and they try and temper/guide her decisions with reprimands and appeals to her mother’s wishes rather than by actually explaining anything of the situation to her. When most of the characters treat her like a teenager becoming an adult, it’s hard to read her as anything else. Again, this would be fine if this were actually marketed as NA or YA, but it’s not. Maybe it’s more of a marketing issue? 🤷‍♀️
   
2. To make matters worse, Clara’s character development in this book is truly abysmal. She does make some progress in some regards, as her budding attraction for Prince Kaelis makes her question some of her previous black-and-white thinking, but gosh, is the process tedious. I don’t know if Clara’s ruminations on the topic were simply introduced too early or what, but she seems to repeat the same thinking points again and again with no change. Like… we get it, you’re questioning whether you can trust this guy… if you’ve not got anything new to add from last time, can we move on?
   
   There was a lot of telling rather than showing of said development to, and seeing as any progress we make in terms of character growth and development is pretty much reset to 0 at the end of this book, the whole character arc just fell really flat. This was perhaps the biggest contributor to my decision not to continue with the series.
   
3. I’m not fully buying the romance between Clara and Prince Kaelis. Sometimes yes, but Kaelis just feels a lot more mature than Clara and it very much doesn’t feel like an equal partnership. Also, it’s not clear why Kaelis likes Clara, although maybe this will be revealed later. Even though it’s technically slowburn, it feels pretty instalovey (or at least instalusty) for not much more reason than the good old “attractiveness + you saved my life/I need your help” equation. This also made the sex scenes (of which there are maybe 2 or 3, but they’re decently long) a bit boring and more of a chore to read than anything else – I definitely skim read them. That bit might just be personal taste, though.

All that being said, there are some positive things that I appreciated about the book.

1. It was quick to read. Although it’s quite long and I found myself complaining a fair bit and at the end just wanting to be done with it, I still managed to read the whole 500+ pages in just a couple sittings within 2 days. It’s pretty fast-paced and easy to read, so it could be good if you like a faster fantasy read.
   
2. The magic system was really interesting. I felt like we actually got quite a lot of information about the magic system in a very organic, non-infodumpy way. Even as someone who isn’t particularly familiar with tarot, I was able to follow how the magic worked – which is pretty important as the limits and possibilities of that magic are a big part of the plot and it looks like it will continue to be for the rest of the series. The rules of the system seem fairly consistently applied and the idea behind the magic is original as far as the books I’ve read personally. If you’re interested in tarot or just like a bit of an original magic system, this might be a winner for you.
   
3. There are some promising side characters. Our main character has some good friendships, both pre-existing and forged throughout the book and although I haven’t fully bought into the emotional depth of the relationships yet, I can see that this would likely happen over the course of a couple books, so there’s a lot of promise there for a good cast of characters outside the main protagonists and antagonists – this is a massive bonus for a fantasy series, in my opinion.
   
4. The non-romance plot isn’t really my cup of tea (although I do sometimes enjoy this kind of plot – here it was okay), but if you do really like “dystopia fantasy” as a subgenre, it will probably appeal to you nicely.

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Verdict

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This should have been a YA book. I’m always very careful critiquing fantasy books by women authors as they so often get lumped in the YA category when they’re not and/or shouldn’t be, but in this case, this book really needed to be a YA book. Maybe new adult, but it’s not marked as either; it’s marked as adult. Where was the adult? Certainly not in our main character.

A sex scene does not make a book adult. Making the character 21 might make the book adult but if the character doesn’t feel 21 (or even particularly mature), then that’s only going to annoy readers expecting an adult protagonist.

In this case, the only things needed to make this a YA book would be to replace the sex scenes with heavy makeout scenes/fade to black and make the age of entry to the academy 17 or 18 instead of 21. Literally no need to change anything else – you could argue it would make Prince Kaelis’ achievements even more unrealistic, but it’s nothing we don’t see in YA all the time. Or if you make Clara 18/19, you can make Kaelis 21/22 and justify it that way. It’s already unrealistic anyway, so what does it really matter, right?

A lot of the issues I have with characterisation and character development would be solved (somewhat) if the character were 16-18 and the book aimed at that age range, who might relate to the character better. However, this is very much not a YA book as there are multiple explicit sex scenes. Therefore, I was really disappointed in a lot of the book and can only give it 2.5 stars. If it were YA it would probably get 3, maybe higher if I had read it back when I was a teenager.

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Question Time

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Have you read this book?
If so – what did you think? If not – do you want to read it now?

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Keira xx