Court of Wanderers

[cornerofmadness]

Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Boy this was SO hard to rate. 3.5 read rounded down for reasons I'll get into soon. But honestly this was sort of a hot mess that really needed to be edited more tightly. Yes it's been a year and a half since I read book one but I shouldn't have felt a desperate need to reread it to make sense of this. I think that's a problem with the whole duology. It's very character driven, nothing wrong with that but it wants to be plot driven.

And the plot is murky at best and that's where it trips itself up and falls flat several times. The whole court system and who wants to kill who and why isn't as well defined as it needed to be, especially since the whole plot of this is the courts want to install Malekh in a place of even more power. The betrayals that come later in the book don't hit nearly as hard as they should because it's so convoluted and unclear it's hard to figure out why I should care about this other than it nearly takes out Remy, Malekh and Xiaodan.

And as much as I still like our trio there isn't much growth for them in this. The biggest question is will Remy eventually allow himself to be turned (more on that later)

For me the biggest issue was the editing. That above mentioned question about Remy is asked multiple times. Sometimes the trio said nearly identical stuff to what they said two chapters ago. It's like 'this again?' I swear sometimes authors/editors run up against deadlines, book one was hot so they don't take the time needed to fix problems. For me there were several repetitive things in it (this being one of the most egregious) that could have been tightened up. The author

Speaking of tightening, this is where someone should have stepped in and said enough is enough. The sex scenes made this feel like bad fanfic. Seriously put me in mind of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer hey days when you'd get 50 page stories with 10 pages of plot and 40 pages of people rolling around in bed. I got SO bored with the sex in this. That's all Remy/Malekh/Xiaodan do! If I sliced out the sex scenes I think this would be a third of the book would be gone. It felt far too much like was overly enamored of watching their lovelies screw that we needed to see this once a chapter.

And some of these scenes were pretty gross and I say that as someone who likes a little bondage, polyamory and dominant female scenarios. None of them were very explicit. On the other hand a very lengthy scene of human familiars servicing their vampires (Remy now included) during court while they're trying to do business as a show of I don't know? Dominance? wasn't sexy, just boring and uncomfortable. Another entire chapter was them fighting while screwing to the point I forgot they were actually having sex since the three of them were talking non stop. Does anyone actually do this?

Had some of the extraneous sex been chopped out (along with the repetition) the pacing issues could have been fixed because seriously I almost DNFed this in the boggy middle. I did very much like the ending even though it was seriously weird and I wished more time was spent on what Malekh and Xiaodan went through at the Allpriory because that should have been a BIG thing but it wasn't.

Not saying I disliked it. I am saying I didn't like it nearly as much as book one. That said, the ending is open and if the author came back to this world down the road I'd read it.





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