And she makes us LIKE the torture, because it reminds us that we feel passion and love.Īs in her first novel, the somewhat stream-of-consciousness writing, even during characters' dialogue, makes me back up and re read to try and figure out what the characters are referring to sometimes.īut, the mark of a good book for me is that the characters stay with you long after the last page is turned. Kelso tortures her characters, and us with them. Reminiscent to me of the depth of emotion and noble importance in Guy Gavriel Kay's writing, Kelso's characters feel so very much while striving to keep each other from harm. Reading Kelso's prose is like taking a dive head first into a warm pool of luscious language and rich emotion. Tellurith, the Ruand (or head of a clannish house) of Amberlight and author of the destruction of the magical, sentient stone qherrique, and along with it, her entire city, is fleeing Amberlight for a vassal town far off in the North.Īlong with her goes Alkhes-Assandar, the former Dhasdein general and Tellurith's lover, and her husband, the Tower (think male harem) bred Sarth.Įach will face sacrifices, challenges, and face some of their most terrible nightmares in order to forge a new life in their new home. In the continuation of Kelso's atmospheric, language-rich, angst-ridden tale of the destruction of a matriarchal fantastical city called Amberlight (first novel in the series) Riversend picks up right where we left off the main characters. But I can't mark it as five-stars in good conscience, so I think I'm just going to leave this one completely unrated. Otherwise, this is a five-star book that I couldn't put down, and I loved it even more than I loved the first book, and am off to immediately buy book three. Some of the aftermath makes sense in the context of this particular world and culture the author has created, but I can't pretend it made for easy reading. Sure, the former is alarming and disturbing to anyone who's not into that particular area of BDSM - but that the whole thing was non-consensual doesn't seem to ping on anybody's radar at all. There's a whole lot of victim-blaming, and everyone seems more upset about the fact that Zuri is a sexual sadist than the fact that the 'incident' was rape. Kelso makes an attempt to acknowledge how messed up this is - Zuri herself is ready to commit suicide afterwards, from guilt and shame - but. ![]() What Zuri does is unquestionably sexual assault, but it's romanticized by the narrative in a way that none of the (attempted) male-on-female or male-on-male sexual violence is. Specifically rape where the victim is male leaving aside the arguably gratuitous amount of suffering Alkhes is forced to go through, the Sarthis/Zuri plotline bothered me a lot. While Riversend is just as beautifully written as its predecessor Amberlight, and much as I appreciated the addition of Alkhes and Sarth as first-person narrators of the story, I can't help but be uncomfortable with how rape is treated in this book. But these tropes bug me done the usual way, and they bug me here. I'm not sure how many of the problems are deliberate - the gender reversal of the easy tropes of a woman who becomes accustomed to the restraints of a society more patriachal than her own. A man is forced to marry his rapist - but it's okay, he really liked it. Alkhes, who was gang-raped in Amberlight, is tortured and raped again. Consenting to sleep in the same bed with someone doesn't mean consenting to have sex with them, Tellurith, and this is something you should negotiate with them before you start making out with them in front of someone else, or with someone else in front of them. ![]() Tellurith springs the news that she wants to have a threesome and not a V-relationship with her husbands while she's in bed with them. Tellurith is autocratic with her own husbands, who do not appear to realize it. Alkhes doesn't adjust easily to Amberlight constraints, but he doesn't show much of the automatic prejudice that his culture would inculcate, and which is hard to root out even when you're trying. I like Kelso's vivid prose, but I have huge problems with her characterization. Sarth is a traditional Amberlight man who was secluded in a harem and trained to please women, and Alkhes is a former general from a patriachal enemy who just waged war against Amberlight. ![]() Her new tripartite marriage causes its own problems her two husbands do not get along. Her reception isn't improved by the presence of her two husbands (her people are polygamous but only allow wives to share men). Following the destruction of the city of Amberlight and the powerful sentient stone known as qherique, Tellurith leads her displace House to a remote province, where traditionalists resist Tellurith's plans to treat men as equals and allow them access to traditionally female trades.
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