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A review by ericadawson
A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This book is good if you flush your expectations down the toilet. Three stars. It reads like a fanfiction.
The plot itself -- a secret plot of counterfeit coins -- is weak enough that I don't believe this as a central conflict supports the story or the characters. Development of the crime, clues revealed, and progress made happens so slowly as to run in the background in favor of watching Kadou and Evemer galavant and ruminate and overthink for pages on end. They spend so much time barhopping while accomplishing almost nothing I started to get the sense the bars were there to serve the character tension rather than the characters *and* the plot.
Facebook reads like a FanFiction because you can basically point out every single trope that the author wanted to hit his as though she had a checklist next to blurb on the back, and she made sure it was clear when one was happening. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind tropes in general. I love a prince/personal guard set up. Yearning, pining, all that. But this was heavy. It was a lot.
Unfortunately, many parts of this book feel like this. There's a heavy disjointedness in the writing that doesn't resolve itself by the end of the book. Especially during the first half the scenes and chapters were almost explicitly divided between developing plot and developing romance, with little mingling of the pairs. Then, from roughly the first third to first half the book there was maybe one or two developments made regarding the progression of the plot. Entire scenes would be dedicated just to getting one characters a few points on a certain event when it could have been spared to a later time in order to conserve space.
The end of the book drags. They finish the main plot quite early on, so then the final chapters are spent pining, lusting, yearning, kissing, getting mad about kissing, and trying to find a workaround for an emergency marriage because they want to fuck but there's a whole annulment/divorce issue that gets resolved pretty quickly. It's incredibly boring, besides the blow job scene.
The political world building was alright. I've seen people praise this book as being tangled with political intrigue, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel as if the author herself was even that interested in world building or developing a more complex political world than what we've got. I like the kahyalar system though.
The characters suffer, all of them. Melek is enjoyable if only because çir rather subdued and down to earth compared to the rest of the cast. Kadou has anxiety that more or less ceases to exist by the halfway point of the book. We get frequent mentions of the "fear creature" in the second half with little to none of the symptoms that accompanied its attacks (panic attacks) in the first half of the book. I'm tempted to say it was because Kadou was forced to stop relying on Tadek, but who can say? The drop off is so Sharp and so distinct that I would have to go back and reread the section in order to figure out where the flip happened. Tadek is kind of cartoonish in his flirting and drama and as much as I adore Evemer, his PoV suffered from the same vocal flaws that Kadous did: repetitive, redundant, rumination. Over and over and over.
Eozona was not a character I could take seriously, much as I would have loved to love her. She was rather dramatic at times. I liked Zeliha, and she definitely has a moment I adore. The others are alright.
Dialogue meshes poorly with the world of the author has built. At times it is far too modern, at other times it is just formal enough to pass. This tonal confusion plagues the entire book, and it doesn't relent, not even up to the very end. Some portions of dialogue, especially when Tadeck is speaking, were painful to get through.
Every single conversation is too long. Kadou and Evemer go back and forth a lot on duty versus desire versus ethics. A lot of convincing to do one thing versus another thing only to go back to the start of the conversation.
This book probably wasn't meant to be read as a comedy, but that was really the only way I could bear the beginning of it. Evemer's contempt for Kadou is so dramatic and so intense I had to laugh. Kadou's anxiety is so wild and twitchy I couldn't tell how sincere it was meant to be.
What really impacted the characters, the writing, the plot, the peace and, the dialogue, all of it, was the voice. The writing style. It's not good. It reads like a fanfiction.
Rowland overuses italics. She has no sense of emphasis in her dialogue, sometimes going as far to italicize entire sentences, multiple words in a sentence, or words that don't need emphasizing at all. Hyphens, ellipses, and repetitions abound. I don't want to read the word "oh" for the rest of my life. (This ties into the weird way the dialogue sounds. "Oh" shows up a lot in narration, and the narration was written as though we're getting the characters' thoughts real time, but not in a way that reads nicely at all).
Sometimes she'll use three analogies or descriptions for something when only one will suffice. It makes her writing clunky and overwritten. She's repeated words quite a few times as well, which makes me wonder where the editor was in all this. Run on sentences (and not the pleasant kind) are also commonplace. We edge the border of getting a wall of text whenever Tadek shows up because he simply doesn't shut up.
I'd copy and paste a block of text as an example, but much of the narration reads like this:
"But Kadou...Kadou was *tired*. He was *scared* and *terrfied*, and he trembled like a leaf in the wind because what else was there to do? Evemer was hurt. Badly hurt. Oh so badly hurt. And that was terrifying and *scary*. Oh, Kadou didn't know what to do with himself. He trembled, the fear-creature *screamed* at him like it wanted to rip him apart, sink its teeth into him, and eat him, skin and bones and tissue and all, and Evemer had no choice but to *let* it."
Rowland destroys tension with poor dialogue, formatting, structure, and narrative descriptions. There was more than one occasion where I couldn't tell which character had just said a piece of dialogue because of her tendency to have character A interrupt character Bs dialogue with an action and then go back to character A talking.
Plenty of time spent describing outfit colors, but I have no idea what Evemer (or really anyone, but especially him) looks like.
Weird formatting quirk where the capital letter T after an end quote looked like it had no space (and sometimes it didn't have one, I think.)
This book is 570 pages because most of it is redundancues and repetition with little to no payoff. Utterly tedious, though it did show me that I enjoy slow burns and semi enemies to lovers a lot.
Three stars. If you "shut your brain off" you'd actually quite enjoy it.
The plot itself -- a secret plot of counterfeit coins -- is weak enough that I don't believe this as a central conflict supports the story or the characters. Development of the crime, clues revealed, and progress made happens so slowly as to run in the background in favor of watching Kadou and Evemer galavant and ruminate and overthink for pages on end. They spend so much time barhopping while accomplishing almost nothing I started to get the sense the bars were there to serve the character tension rather than the characters *and* the plot.
Facebook reads like a FanFiction because you can basically point out every single trope that the author wanted to hit his as though she had a checklist next to blurb on the back, and she made sure it was clear when one was happening. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mind tropes in general. I love a prince/personal guard set up. Yearning, pining, all that. But this was heavy. It was a lot.
Unfortunately, many parts of this book feel like this. There's a heavy disjointedness in the writing that doesn't resolve itself by the end of the book. Especially during the first half the scenes and chapters were almost explicitly divided between developing plot and developing romance, with little mingling of the pairs. Then, from roughly the first third to first half the book there was maybe one or two developments made regarding the progression of the plot. Entire scenes would be dedicated just to getting one characters a few points on a certain event when it could have been spared to a later time in order to conserve space.
The end of the book drags. They finish the main plot quite early on, so then the final chapters are spent pining, lusting, yearning, kissing, getting mad about kissing, and trying to find a workaround for an emergency marriage because they want to fuck but there's a whole annulment/divorce issue that gets resolved pretty quickly. It's incredibly boring, besides the blow job scene.
The political world building was alright. I've seen people praise this book as being tangled with political intrigue, but I didn't feel it. I didn't feel as if the author herself was even that interested in world building or developing a more complex political world than what we've got. I like the kahyalar system though.
The characters suffer, all of them. Melek is enjoyable if only because çir rather subdued and down to earth compared to the rest of the cast. Kadou has anxiety that more or less ceases to exist by the halfway point of the book. We get frequent mentions of the "fear creature" in the second half with little to none of the symptoms that accompanied its attacks (panic attacks) in the first half of the book. I'm tempted to say it was because Kadou was forced to stop relying on Tadek, but who can say? The drop off is so Sharp and so distinct that I would have to go back and reread the section in order to figure out where the flip happened. Tadek is kind of cartoonish in his flirting and drama and as much as I adore Evemer, his PoV suffered from the same vocal flaws that Kadous did: repetitive, redundant, rumination. Over and over and over.
Eozona was not a character I could take seriously, much as I would have loved to love her. She was rather dramatic at times. I liked Zeliha, and she definitely has a moment I adore. The others are alright.
Dialogue meshes poorly with the world of the author has built. At times it is far too modern, at other times it is just formal enough to pass. This tonal confusion plagues the entire book, and it doesn't relent, not even up to the very end. Some portions of dialogue, especially when Tadeck is speaking, were painful to get through.
Every single conversation is too long. Kadou and Evemer go back and forth a lot on duty versus desire versus ethics. A lot of convincing to do one thing versus another thing only to go back to the start of the conversation.
This book probably wasn't meant to be read as a comedy, but that was really the only way I could bear the beginning of it. Evemer's contempt for Kadou is so dramatic and so intense I had to laugh. Kadou's anxiety is so wild and twitchy I couldn't tell how sincere it was meant to be.
What really impacted the characters, the writing, the plot, the peace and, the dialogue, all of it, was the voice. The writing style. It's not good. It reads like a fanfiction.
Rowland overuses italics. She has no sense of emphasis in her dialogue, sometimes going as far to italicize entire sentences, multiple words in a sentence, or words that don't need emphasizing at all. Hyphens, ellipses, and repetitions abound. I don't want to read the word "oh" for the rest of my life. (This ties into the weird way the dialogue sounds. "Oh" shows up a lot in narration, and the narration was written as though we're getting the characters' thoughts real time, but not in a way that reads nicely at all).
Sometimes she'll use three analogies or descriptions for something when only one will suffice. It makes her writing clunky and overwritten. She's repeated words quite a few times as well, which makes me wonder where the editor was in all this. Run on sentences (and not the pleasant kind) are also commonplace. We edge the border of getting a wall of text whenever Tadek shows up because he simply doesn't shut up.
I'd copy and paste a block of text as an example, but much of the narration reads like this:
"But Kadou...Kadou was *tired*. He was *scared* and *terrfied*, and he trembled like a leaf in the wind because what else was there to do? Evemer was hurt. Badly hurt. Oh so badly hurt. And that was terrifying and *scary*. Oh, Kadou didn't know what to do with himself. He trembled, the fear-creature *screamed* at him like it wanted to rip him apart, sink its teeth into him, and eat him, skin and bones and tissue and all, and Evemer had no choice but to *let* it."
Rowland destroys tension with poor dialogue, formatting, structure, and narrative descriptions. There was more than one occasion where I couldn't tell which character had just said a piece of dialogue because of her tendency to have character A interrupt character Bs dialogue with an action and then go back to character A talking.
Plenty of time spent describing outfit colors, but I have no idea what Evemer (or really anyone, but especially him) looks like.
Weird formatting quirk where the capital letter T after an end quote looked like it had no space (and sometimes it didn't have one, I think.)
This book is 570 pages because most of it is redundancues and repetition with little to no payoff. Utterly tedious, though it did show me that I enjoy slow burns and semi enemies to lovers a lot.
Three stars. If you "shut your brain off" you'd actually quite enjoy it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness
Moderate: Cursing and Blood