Reviews

A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland

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mischel's review against another edition

medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

I REALLY liked the romance in this. The characters were SO SO vividly written, easy to love, and their slow-burn love story was just excellent! That said, I do have a few notes.

First, I really would have appreciated a map, or at the very least, a glossary. I struggled to remember what everything meant at the start, and there were so many terms! Kahya, Kahyalar, Satyota, or Usmim to name a few, and a dozen place names that I no longer remember.

Second, when I started the book I really hoped the entire plot wouldn't revolve around the coins, but how wrong I was 😂 But that was my mistake, I went into it completely blind and didn't even really read the summary 😂 I guess for me, when a book is "adventurous", it means that there's high stakes, danger, and definitely some travelling, and not just moving between only three places (chambers, garden, tavern, chambers, garden, tavern, different chambers, garden, different tavern, etc.) and worrying about coins. It honestly felt more like urban fantasy than regular fantasy, and that's not really my thing. Because of this, the first half of the book felt almost a little too slow for me (the excellent chemistry between Kadou and Evemer definitely kept me reading though), but thankfully, the second half was much better. The stakes were higher (finally some concrete danger!), the characters were finally moving around (getting kidnapped, even! Though that particular part was very short-lived imo), and it felt like things were moving along. Both the romance and the coin plot.

Third, I really wish the main villain wasn't

Spoiler

Siranos

😂 If you had asked me on the third page of the entire book who the villain was, I would have guessed correctly. Which is precisely why I hoped it wouldn't be him, I thought the book would give me at least one plot twist, but alas.

And fourth, I was excited for the metal-tasting "magic" powers, but in the end, it was barely ever used. I hoped the ability would lead to some epic moments but unfortunately it didn't. At all. But at least it was interesting enough -- I liked how

Spoiler

Kadou's touch-taste of iron changed bc of the memory with Evemer,

that was cool.

All of that aside though, as I said before, I LOVED the love story. It was slow but so real and just so enjoyable and perfect. I couldn't stop reading whenever Kadou and Evemer had a scene together, and I cheered every time they seemed to get closer. And just, ALL the characters!! Where do I even start? They felt so real!! When I compare them to the characters in the last book I read, the contrast is almost funny, because both Kadou and Evemer and all the other characters, really, were so different from each other. Their personalities were so clear, and just so, so, so, as I said before, vivid. I think that's why the romance worked so well. Kadou and Evemer had a great chemistry.

juliafrat's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

becxreadz's review against another edition

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Really bored

alicesbookrecs's review against another edition

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3.0

In theory this book is everything I wanted: a queer fantasy romance involving a prince and his bodyguard. However, perhaps this is why I was so disappointed with it; it had so many drawbacks that I considered dnf-ing it for the first 1/3 of it. I would have rated it 2.5 stars if I could but as I enjoyed the second half a lot more than the first I decided to round it up to 3.

To start with something I liked, the story centred around older characters, with the main character being 25 which is rare to see in fantasy.

Now to get onto the things that I didn't; the book reads a bit like a fan fiction for me in terms of the world building and some of the writing. To start with the world building, it feels like we’re kind of thrown into a world where we should already know everything - their is no explanation or context to the locations, powers… described. We’re just thrown into this world and are expected to know and remember everything. As an example, I didn't really understand sense memory for a while as it was just introduced in passing, and didn't realise that it was a common power that apparently people like 1 in 10 people had; ‘Satoya’ also weren't explained until it was necessary in the story. Also, concepts such as ‘bodyfathers’ were just mentioned with no explanation of what one actually was until about 2/3 into the book. The çe and çir was also confusing as I thought they were new characters the first time I saw them, and honestly I’m still unsure of what they were supposed to mean as I just mentally substituted them for ‘he’ and ‘him’.

To get onto the writing, it was kind of clunky in some places - some sentences were unnecessarily long making them hard to read, with one spanning over 8 lines; I had to re-read this one about 3 times to fully understand it.

I’m also normally a fan of longer chapters, but for this book it just killed me slowly - one of the chapters was 64 pages and I honestly wanted to dnf it there.

Also the way Tenzin just let them escape so easily and even went with them …

The amount of descriptions of Kadou being anxious throughout this book again slowly killed me. At first I regarded it as relatable as I also struggle strongly with anxiety, and it was also a big part of his character so I understood, but from like the third chapter in when the author spent ages describing how much of an anxious mess he was I just got annoyed by this as it felt like it was mentioned every other page (which it was, if not more frequently).

I’d also like to point out how much of a shit stirrer Siranos is; anyone with a brain could see that Kadous too much of an anxious mess to plan something against his own sister and I honestly don’t understand how the whole plot of the book is based around this. Due to this, I disliked Kadous sister as she seemingly decided to stop using her brain and put her hoe over her bro.

Linking to the previous point, the villain in the book is so obvious from the moment he's introduced that its painful; there were no surprises or plot twists at all.

Now to get onto the relationship between Kadou and Evemer. It seems like the author was trying to incorporate a bit of an enemies to lovers and forbidden love feel but it failed for me even though I normally love these troupes. When the two first met they both regarded one another as handsome and attractive; however, due to how two of Kadous guards died, which were also Evermers friends, he immediately hated him, disregarding the fact that they literally did their jobs.

I also wasn't a fan of how Evemers whole perception of Kadou changed after he saved his life, with him going from hating Kadou to immediately admiring his eyes. this just seems like such a flimsy vain overused troupe of ‘oh he saved me I’m in love with him now’, and it also didn't make much sense honestly when you consider how Evemer thought of Kadou at the start of the book. [SPOILER]

Also not Evemer realising he was in love with Kadou while literally scrubbing his back…

I’d also like to point out that they technically didn’t consummate their marriage.

[END OF SPOILER]

Linking to how I don’t get how Evemers opinion of Kadou does a complete flip, another big thing that made me want to dnf this book was how Evemer kept wondering what was wrong with Kadou and calling him flighty and careless; to me it read as really condemning and un-understanding. He literally tells himself that he has to “forgive” Kadou for having anxiety and essentially being a human …

It did generally get more interesting halfway through the book though as the pace picked up.

Eozena also deserves a notable mention, with her providing my favourite line in the book: “If I have erred and one of them turns out to be a traitor, Majesty, please don’t worry about arranging a trial for me. I will handle it honourably by myself. I’m thinking of the cliff, so I have plenty of time to think about my errors on the way down”

The ending was also a bit lacklustre.

Due to all this, I really struggled to read this book which normally is never a thing - there was too much going on and I had to concentrate so much on what I was reading and re read things too often and I couldn't really get into the relationship of Kadou and Evemer.

axelgrcia's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

wardenred's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A man could be good, but a prince? A prince could only be good enough. He could, if he tried his utmost, meet expectations. But they were far, far too high for anyone to be able to exceed them.

Well, this was an interesting experience! I really, really loved the romance and the two leads' character arcs. These parts of the books were handled absolutely beautifully. The slow burn? The gradual growth fueled by all the realizations? The way Kadou and Evemer just worked together? The themes of fealty? The way Kadou's anxiety was handled? Evemers entire personality? Aspects of so many of my favorite tropes woven together into one glorious tapestry, from enemies to lovers to bodyguard romance to fake dating? Perfection, really. In terms of all this, the book hit all of my buttons.

Everything around the romance, though... The more I read on and the closer I looked at the other aspects of the novel, the more weirdly artificial everything around the two main characters looked. On the surface, the Ottoman-inspired setting was brimming with detail, from infodumps about currency to the smaller stuff like all the descriptions of food and clothes. But somehow, most of it felt like digging deeper would reveal a glaring void rather than a larger iceberg. And hey, you know what, that is often indeed the case with SFF novels that aren't *about* worldbuilding! Half the magic of writing sometimes is about arranging the stuff you have in a way that makes readers feel that it goes so much deeper than it does. But here, those tricks just felt strangely obvious. Like almost everything about the setting mattered inasmuch as it affected the main characters and their budding relationship.

There were two aspects of the worldbuilding that I found genuinely interesting and thought-provoking. One, in a good way: the way inheritance works, the whole deal with body-fathers, how female rulers don't need to marry because everyone already understands their children are their own/belong to the dynasty, whereas male rulers have to marry to have the legal claim as fathers. This here is a lot of cool stuff. The other aspect, I'm more on the fence about, although I appreciate it: the active inclusion of nonbinary characters, or rather, the way it was handled. On one hand, it was incredibly cool that there were so many, that society is fully accepting of nonbinary characters, that there's an accepted third set of pronouns, etc! I love this! On the other hand, as a nonbinary person I disliked how all of them were basically shoved into the same category. There are men, women, and there's a third gender. Here are three boxes to sort yourselves into instead of two. Um. Call. What if someone doesn't fit into any of the boxes regardless? What about genderfluid people? It's inclusive on one hand, and constraining on another in a way I feel the treatment of nonbinary identities just shouldn't be. Idk. I'd rather stand under an umbrella than live in a box, personally.

Then there's the external plot, and, my. That's the whole reason this could never be more than a four-star read read for me. It was just so utterly shallow and at times silly! Even more so than with the worldbuilding, every bit of it glaringly, obviously, starkly existed to allow for hitting the romance plot beats at the right times. The villain might as well have been walking around with a big neon sign, "HELLO I'M THE BAD GUY," and the fact it took hundreds of pages to uncover the whole mystery/conspiracy says nothing good about plenty of the characters. In fact, it completely ruins the initially strong characterization of the female characters—Zeliha and Eozena—which is a damn shame. With Zeliha in particular, it's just so frustrating. She initially looked like a strong, capable, complex woman juggling a lot of important threads, but apparently, she just needed to listen more to her younger brother early on and the fact she didn't paints her in a rather strange light at the end. I kept waiting for some twist to occur and prove to me that the "big neon sign" was in a fact a red herring, but noooo.

The romance, though. The romance and its development. That sure deserves all the stars, just as the deep delves into both leads' inner worlds (I come from fanfic, okay, I'm a sucker for 500-pages character studies) and Rowland's amazing prose. So all in all, I liked the time I spent with the book—and picking apart all of its element to see the purpose of each was fun and educating in its own way!

Content Warnings