I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read any of your novels before. Given how long I’ve been a fantasy reader, I don’t know how I managed to accomplish that. I hope my blogging partners here at Dear Author won’t hold it against me since several of them love your books. Better late than never, right?

To be honest, this probably wasn’t the best novel of yours to start with. First of all, it’s the fifth installment of an established series. While I didn’t get lost or confused at any point in the book, I could tell I was missing a lot of texture and richness when it came to the characterizations and relationships. I don’t think the book suffered because of it but I feel that people who’ve read previous books in the series would have gotten more out of it than a new reader like me would. That’s a just a theory though. I’d be interested in hearing from any other new readers who started with this book and what they thought about the presentation of characters and events.

I liked the idea of this book. So many fantasy novels are devoted to the build-up of society-altering war. While I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of well-written books exploring that subject, I also like reading about what happens after the war, especially to those who’ve been left behind or who have survived. Wen epitomizes the broken soldier: she suffers from survivor’s guilt because she failed to protect the king she served. Her entire life was devoted to being a Rider and with her failure and the king’s resulting death, she lost her purpose in life. These days, she wanders the countryside without purpose, helping random people in need in order to atone for her failure.

In many ways, this book is a recovery story of how Wen heals the wound left on her heart. It’s true that there are 49 other Riders but Wen was of two guarding the king at the time he died. I enjoyed the parts devoted to this plotline the most, in which Wen finds herself stuck at Fortune, trying to cobble together a guard to protect the life of the much-hated Rayson Fortunalt’s daughter and heir, Karryn. I love stories like this: forming an unit, training together, and making them a strong fighting force. I realize it’s mundane and not at all the flashiness you’d expect from the fantasy genre, but those small details combined with Wen’s struggle to overcome her self-loathing made it work for me.

I also liked the bits we saw of Karryn, who has to fight against the legacy left behind by her despised father. While a part of me suspects we will eventually see a book about Karryn and Ryne in the future (and I wouldn’t object to this), I enjoyed how you gave us a character who tried to do the exact opposite of her father and become the sort of noble that engenders loyalty and devotion among her followers and people.

On the other hand, I thought those two storylines were overshadowed by Cammon and the others. I know the previous books were about these characters so maybe this was meant to serve as a “Hello, again” to them but since I haven’t read them, I wasn’t interested. And maybe because I haven’t read them, I felt Cammon’s storyline was overindulgent and unnecessary. I don’t think it added much to the book, frankly. Even when we get to the inevitable meeting between Cammon’s group and Wen, I still don’t think its importance warranted the number of the pages it received.

I’ve also heard from Jane and Janine that your books tend to be romantic as well. I’m going to have to assume this book is not one of the best examples because I didn’t find Wen and Jasper’s burgeoning relationship romantic. I thought it was interesting in the beginning with their nightly meetings, but the development and culmination didn’t quite live up to the expectatations I’d formed. Perhaps that was my mistake for making assumptions and having high expectations.

While this book didn’t make me fall madly in love with your work and want to rush out and buy your entire backlist, it did succeed in making me interested about the previous books in this series. I do think, however, this is a book best enjoyed by existing fans of the Thirteen Houses series and best skipped by new readers — at least until they’ve read the previous installments. C+

My regards,
Jia

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

Related posts:

1. DUELING REVIEW: Reader and Raelynx by Sharon Shinn
2. REVIEW: Fate and Ms. Fortune by Saralee Rosenberg
3. REVIEW: Dark Moon Defender by Sharon Shinn

Your path to publication is fairly well known to the readers of Dear Author. We posted updates about the Gather contest, had the opportunity to read your first two chapters online, and celebrated your victory in winning the first ever Gathers.com romance writing contest. A little while later, Janine shared with us that she is a critique partner of yours. You’ve been a frequent commenter and your insights into the genre have always been fascinating. It is because of that this review is doubly hard to write. I may be the only one with this contrary opinion as well, but in the interest of fairness to the readership here at DA, I was compelled to give my thoughts of this book.

I won’t belabor the plot as Janet carefully articulated it in her review. I found the prose to be good, but not extraordinary and for me, the prose was not enough to lift the characters and plot out of average status.

The story begins with a tumultuous shipwreck wherein Emmaline Martin is the only survivor. The prologue is a powerful emotional scene. Unfortunately what follows is an immediate denouement featuring fairly stock romance characters. In some sense, I felt that Duke of Shadows was a traditional historical romance wrapped in a fancy India cloth rather than having that cloth woven throughout.

Emma is a bluestocking with ordinary bluestocking concerns. She is bored with the British colonial society. She questions her role amongst these people. She’s attracted to the native culture and the native people. Her fiance, Marcus, is the villian. He is also a bit cardboard-ish. He is greedy (marrying Emma for her money), flagrantly cheats on Emma, and hits her too. I was waiting for the obligatory villian sex scene with one of his female relatives, but that, thankfully, never happened. Julian, the hero, is a half Indian, half English heir to a dukedom. He’s darker skinned, honorable, and disgusted with British imperialism while being heir to the highest title in the land.

In a twist, the heroine is the tormented character of the book. She’s beset with survivor’s guilt probably in part due to the shipwreck but seemingly more related to the events that take place in the second half of the book. I actually felt the opening scene with the shipwreck could have been completely removed and it would have had no impact on the overall story. That was a disappointment.

I also thought that for most of the first half of the book, heroine was less of a character and more of a vessel for whatever message the story was trying to convey at the time. Initially Emma was the bluestocking that was out of sync with the British colonial society. Then she played the role of the pro-colonial message as a foil for the anti-colonial hero. It wasn’t until the second half of the book that Emma came alive as an individual for me.

The good thing about this book is that Julian is not an alpha asshole. He’s actually a decent guy who wants to use his position to help those around him. Emma, too, is a likeable character when her emotional conflict becomes the center of the story. Emma and Julian’s connection is strong and romantic.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with the story is the first half. I think Duke of Shadows competently written with a sophisticated voice but I had a difficult time getting emotionally attached to the heroine. Even though the setting is fresh, many of the themes and motifs are traditional, particularly when it came to the characterization of the heroine. It was a struggle to get to the second half and I think for any other book, this would have been a DNF for me. C.

Best regards

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon, Powells or in ebook format.

***

Ann Aguirre loves this book and is holding a contest to readers who blog about this book. Your opinion might be quite different than mine. The prizes include gift certificates to bookstores. We love those, don’t we?

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran
2. My First Sale by Meredith Duran
3. REVIEW: Shadows of Myth/Shadows of Prophecy by Rachel Lee

This is a difficult review for me to write. Sometimes, after reading a book, I have so few thoughts that it takes me a long time to marshal enough feedback for a substantive review. Other times – as with The Duke of Shadows – I have so many thoughts and instinctive reactions to the book that I’m not sure I can articulate clearly a condensed, coherent position. Part of the problem is that it took me almost two weeks to get through Part One of the novel and about two hours to read through Part Two. By Part Two I felt invested and excited enough to read to the end in one straight shot, and ultimately I’m glad I persisted.

Emmaline Martin arrives in India to marry the man to whom she’s been betrothed since she was a child, but she arrives the lone survivor of a shipwreck that took both her parents, thanks to an overturned rowboat and a passing Irish freighter. The rigid class values the British in India adhere to (must not fall in with the “blackies,” after all) place Emma in a suspect category, not because of the enormity of her loss or her overwhelming grief, but because no one knows if her virtue was compromised by the Irish sailors (they were another species of “blackies” to the English, after all). Her fiancé, Marcus Lindley, is particularly curious about this, which puts us on immediate alert that he is Not The One for Emma. Indeed, Marcus is a bully whose greatest love is for Emma’s substantial fortune, and he is not happy that his little Emmaline does not arrive in India the perfect British miss – that is, fearful and dismissive of the local cultures, supportive of the British military campaign, and primly cheerful.

The only one who sees behind Emma’s proper facade, it seems, is Lindley’s cousin, Julian Sinclair, the future Duke of Auburn and a man of mixed Indian and English heritage. Like Emma, Julian shares the dilemma of not wholly fitting in to “proper” society, and he seems drawn to Emma in part because of her sense of apartness, but also because she has a certain vibrancy that he does not see in other women. Emma, as an artist, wants to see more of India than the average “memsahib,” which somewhat predictably leads her to clash with Marcus and places her in danger of serving as a scapegoat for native resentment of British imperial rule. The gathering unrest in India, and the eventual uprising of native Indians, including many who previously worked within the British military structure, places Emma in grave danger, and her temporary savior is not her fiancé, who is too busy “subduing” the Indians, but Julian, who promises Emma that he will get her to safety.

I don’t want to spoil this section of the book, which combines Julian and Emma’s growing attachment with a number of incidents that become significant later on, so I will skip forward to England, where the second half of the novel takes place. Back in England, both Julian and Emma are dealing with the horrors they experienced and witnessed in India. Neither knows the other is alive and well, having been separated in India and assuming the other dead. Neither has been able to escape the emotional devastation of so much violence, even though Julian is now the Duke of Auburn and Emma an heiress living with her cousin in London. Emma, we discover, has suffered particularly badly, struggling with her very sanity in the months and then years after escaping from India, guilt-ridden over things she saw and did there, suffering from nightmares, depression, even mania at times. Julian, on the other hand, is guilt-ridden thinking he has caused Emma’s death, and so when he sees her at a London society event a full four years after they separated in India, he can barely believe it, although he is no less surprised than Emma.

The event is a showing of Emma’s paintings of the violence in India, which she completed after she returned, and which her cousin showed against Emma’s wishes to Lord Lockwood, who is captivated and wishes to make Emma a famous artist. Emma has since been unable to create anything as alive as those paintings, and her frustration adds to her existing depression. She does not want these paintings shown publicly, but she is also ambitious, wanting to make a name for herself as an artist, so she eventually allows them to be shown under a pseudonym. So seeing Julian, who is so desperate to renew their relationship, offers her only the prospect of more pain, more public exposure of things she would rather leave hidden, and she ruthlessly rejects the Duke, despite his persistent attentions. It is only because of an unknown danger to Emma, related to a strange series of phrases painted at the bottom of each of her pictures, that they maintain contact, as Julian is one of the few people who knows that Emma is the artist of those provocative paintings. And while Julian’s presence in Emma’s life threatens to unbalance what little grip she has on normalcy, Julian sees in Emma the only person who understands him and a profound need for understanding and healing herself.

I know this is a lot of summary, but trust me, it doesn’t do the book justice. Many times while I was reading I was mentally comparing Duke of Shadows with one of my favorites, Rangoon by Christine Monson (which takes place in Burma), a book that has some superficial similarities with Duke of Shadows but is considerably longer. It is the longer length that is of greatest importance here, because it allowed for a more epic breadth of plotting as well as a very thoughtful cultural observation and commentary. And I couldn’t help thinking, especially in the early parts of Duke of Shadows, that the novel simply needed more room to fill out its vividly ambitious vision. The class and cultural differences, the complexity of Julian’s mixed heritage and split loyalties, the contest between Marcus and Julian for Emma’s loyalty, the shipwreck and its effects on Emma, the violence sweeping India, Emma and Julian’s escape, the terrible trauma Emma suffers – there is so much within ten chapters that this section of the novel feels simultaneously rushed and yet strangely muted. Marcus’s ugliness seems one-dimensional, Julian’s attraction to Emma seriously underdeveloped, Emma’s trauma ever-present but not fully detailed (I wish we had seen something of her parents, of the shipwreck, of the rescue, for example), the cultural critique of British rule in India insightful but a bit heavy handed. Despite my intense appreciation for the Indian setting and the lovely details of the geography, the people, and the culture, this section feels surprisingly derivative in terms of Romance clichés (Julian as the rake, Emma as the virgin, Marcus as the eevil suitor).

By contrast, the second section of the novel, which takes place in dreary old London, feels much more novel and nuanced to me, much more focused on Emma’s emotional journey, her powerful struggles to cope with the aftermath of so much terror and trauma, and her powerful desire to transform herself into an artist who does not have to paint dark scenes to express her skill and creative vision. It is in this section that we see why Julian has been so drawn to Emma; the loneliness of being a survivor plagues both of them, and while she wants to reject that link because of its still raw pain, Julian wants a chance to redeem himself for the guilt he experienced at not being able to see her to safety in India. It is in this section that we see Julian, not as the jaded and worldly rake, but as a man who truly loves and wants to embrace Emma, who possesses an innate kindness that frankly scares the woman who believes that she is too terrible to love. Watching Julian try to break through Emma’s shell can be absolutely breathtaking:

“You must leave me alone,” she said, staring at nothing. There was a
giant globe, big as a carriage wheel, standing near the desk. It was startling and unusual, and she recalled suddenly having heard of it: the Ardsmores’ famous globe. She stepped forward and put one finger on England. How small it looked, how defenseless, against the vast waters of the world.

His hand closed on hers. “No,” he said, very close, his lips brushing her ear. The passage of his breath called up goosebumps from her skin. She could feel the heat of him all along her back, only an inch or two separating them. She inhaled, heard the way it shook. Her throat was seizing. He murmured, “Let’s go back, shall we?” And his hand moved hers across the surface of the orb, applying pressure to give the globe a spin, so her finger came to rest on the shape of the Indian subcontinent.

“Where were you?” he asked quietly. He moved her finger to Delhi. “Here you were. Almost four years ago, exactly. And I found you in the garden, with your face turned to the breeze.”

Don’t do this. She shut her eyes. His hand tightened on hers.

“Open them,” he said savagely. “If I can bear it, so can you.”

Her next breath sounded like a sob. She felt his reaction to it; it was communicated through his flesh, his arm pressing along the side of hers, the way his knuckles whitened.

“You were in the garden,” he said. “You did not like the wine. It was awful, you were right. We spoke here, for the first time, in Delhi. And we touched here for the first time, as well. It was sweet, Emma. So sweet.” His lips turned into her neck. It was not a kiss. Merely a-touch. It had nothing to do with the other, in that hallway in Delhi. So long ago. “Do you remember?” he said, shaping the words against her skin, so the memory that broke over her was not visual, but physical. He had brought stars out in her stomach, that time. She had liked it then but now it made her want to scream; it was soft torture, the drip of a waterclock when one had a migraine; it exacerbated the pain she already felt. Pain she had been done with, which she should not have to feel any longer.

This Emma, the one Julian has trapped against the globe, is afraid of everything and nothing. She is worlds away – or so she believes – from the young woman who once trusted Julian with everything she once thought she was:

He kissed her again, and she opened her eyes to the stars. Infinite and uncountable, bright and cold and distant. They brought her back into her skin. She ran a hand down his damp back. “My God…” he whispered.

Behind Julian’s head, the ruins were looming, darker than the darkness itself. The earth was so dark, and the ruins so small, compared to the stars. His head rose, blocking out the sight. He leaned down to kiss her. “Everything in your face,” he murmured. “Emma, come back to me. I’m here with you.”

Yes, she thought, so he was, and felt something inside her turn over, an old grief or a new hope-the sensation so sharp that she sobbed. It might have startled him; she could not tell by his face, for he was already pulling her up into his lap, his arms wrapping around her as he rocked her.

“I’m here,” he said into her ear, as the tears came faster. “Emma, I’m here with you now. Listen to me: I will always be here.”

Always, she thought. He said "always,’ but he had forgotten to say finally. Finally you are here. Thank God, finally at last.

If only the intensity of emotion and the tautness of the prose had been consistent, this may have been an A range book for me. There are a number of moments that feel absolutely transcendent, where Emma’s pain or her hope is so viscerally rendered that they practically bleed off the page. But there are also many moments where things feel truncated or predictable and threaten to stagnate the novel. The villainy, for example – the fact that I can only describe it with that term, even – is unsurprising and unsubtle. And while the nature of Julian and Emma’s connection is well developed in Part Two, the way they become initially acquainted and attached feels somewhat forced and superficial, with Julian dutifully playing the role of resident rake, promising sinful sensuality to the technically pure but not necessarily innocent Emma. Also, the secondary suspense plot works to bring Julian and Emma together, creates an opportune occasion for some angry and passionate canoodling, and brings together some of the novel’s loose ends, but it also seemed oddly traditional in a book featuring a pretty untraditional relationship between its hero and heroine. And one of the most interesting characters to me, Lord Lockwood, has an extremely provocative but incomplete story, which strikes me as either sequel-bait or the victim of really vicious editing. But then there are those wonderful moments. Which, frankly, saved the book from languishing, a perpetual half-finished TBR, and buoyed my grade from something low average to a B-, with enough anticipation for the next book that I will actively be looking for it, hoping for a whole book of richly-rendered, transcendent moments.

~ Janet

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon, Powells or in ebook format.

***

Ann Aguirre loves this book and is holding a contest to readers who blog about this book. Take a gander if you are interested. The prizes include gift certificates to bookstores. We love those, don’t we?

Related posts:

1. My First Sale by Meredith Duran
2. REVIEW: Shadows of the Night by Lydia Joyce
3. REVIEW: Shadows of Myth/Shadows of Prophecy by Rachel Lee