Reign and Ruin by J.D. Evans [SPFBO]

The Blurb:

“All magic is beautiful,” she said, “and terrible. Do you not see the beauty in yours, or the terror in mine? You can stop a heart, and I can stop your breath.” 

She is heir to a Sultanate that once ruled the world. He is an unwanted prince with the power to destroy.

She is order and intellect, a woman fit to rule in a man’s place. He is chaos and violence and will stop at nothing to protect his people.

His magic answers hers with shadow for light. They need each other, but the cost of balance may be too high a price. Magic is dying and the only way to save it is to enlist mages who wield the forbidden power of death, mages cast out centuries ago in a brutal and bloody war.

Now, a new war is coming. Science and machines to replace magic and old religion.

They must find a way to save their people from annihilation and balance the sacred Wheel—but first, they will have to balance their own forbidden passion. His peace for her tempest, his restlessness for her calm… 

Night and day, dusk and dawn, the end, and the beginning.

Devin’s Review

Note: This is a potential semifinalist.

Well! Reign and Ruin is a fantasy romance, but it’s also a tense political fantasy and part of a larger narrative, all things it balances very well. I often find when plot-based genre elements (like romance, mystery, political thriller etc) are combined that one often wins out over the others and sometimes this leaves one aspect of the story unsatisfying. Reign and Ruin makes no such error, appropriately balancing both MCs political ends and loyalties with their growing, and dangerous, interest in one another.

As a very active reader of romance novels, I’ve developed quite high standards over the years regarding the sense of realism I need in a relationship—what is the attraction? What do they provide that the other needs? Is the timeline sensible? Are they actually seeing each other as complete humans or as idealised cardboard cutouts?—and I’m happy to say that Reign and Ruin delivers well on these points, too. There’s no instalove here, I can easily see both what initially attracts them to one another and what leads to a deepening of their feelings, and they’re not viewing each other as perfect beings with no faults. It’s complex, nuanced and takes its time—rather like the tense political plot it runs alongside.

The central plot problem is quite simple, Naime wants to inherit her fathers throne and not be forced into marriage, but of course no plan goes smoothly and she’s left scrambling to keep catching the pieces as they fall around her and jam them together into a new plan—to fail not an option. But the beauty of this is in the details and the nuance, in how tightly each move they all make, whether big or small, is bound to their character and their goals. This isn’t a book where the plot controls the characters like they’re just pawns in a game, rather where a cast of complex characters, each carrying their own suffering and view of the world, control the plot through a myriad of interwoven decisions.

Something else I deeply appreciated was how integrated the magic system was into the political and social aspects of the world building. It didn’t exist externally to the social order or the political machinations, rather the magic system was integral to both. There was no aspect of this book that could be removed without destroying the whole thing.

In my view, the aspects that let the book down are ones purely of personal preference that another reader may not care about or even notice—voice and prose. Neither are bad, but they’re more serviceable than glorious in my opinion. The prose doesn’t seem to quite know what it wants to do. Sometimes it’s dry and to the point—short sharp statements of fact—while at other times it leans into the highly poetic, yet this juxtaposition serves more to jar one out of the story rather than to emphasise and draw one in. There is also no great sense of narrative voice, no personality to the writing, and while this is, in the grand scheme of things, a small gripe, it’s the additional piece of pizazz that elevates good books to great books for me.

That’s not to say the characters are dull or boring. The side characters are all fleshed out, and both Naime and Makram are working through a combination of past hurts and present difficulties especially with the respective families. I particularly enjoyed Naime’s relationship with her ailing father and the difficulties his illness heaved upon her, and Makram’s extremely complicated relationship with his brother—there is so much more going on here than an easy romance with some backstabbing shenanigans, and I enjoyed the chance to dig my teeth into characters nuanced enough for psychoanalysis and deep late night musings over the interlacing of joy and suffering inherent in the human condition (My idea of fun… yeah I’m weird).

So despite my couple of complaints, I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of reading this book, so much so that I ended up ordering the second and third in the series in paperback so I could keep reading when I find the time. A highly recommend read for anyone who enjoys fantasy romance or intricately twisting and tense political drama.

To check out our other SPFBO 7 reviews and keep up to date on which books are still in the running, check out our SPFBO 7 Hub page here.