A Taste of Gold and Iron

Both heroes to melt your heart. Consent beautifully handled in a feudal society, so sensitive and clever! Excellent worldbuilding, great political plotting and court life. Fun!

A queer fantasy with Ottoman Empire esthetics and fandom fave tropes. It’s the slowest of burns, with a romance between a prince and his loyal bodyguard, who don’t like each other at first, and then there’s Only One Bed. Kadou is a prince, but he sometimes suffers from panic attacks. Though the language to describe them as we would today isn’t there. He feels he’s a coward who’s failing his sister, who’s the Sultan, and their people. I do like the relationship between the siblings who are still finding their way as Sultan and Prince instead of just brother and sister, though this is not a huge part of the plot. Evemer is the very definition of stoic, and I do like that we eventually see his home life and his fellow guards comment on now understanding why he is the way he is. He’s appointed to serve Kadou after an incident with the father of the Sultan’s infant daughter, in which some of the guards are killed. Evemer does his duty, but still believes Kadou is at fault for their deaths. Kadou does as well, which causes further anxiety attacks. This is the core of the Big Misunderstanding between the two, who due to proximity begin to learn there’s more to the other than what they think they know. I loved the normalized queer representation. From what I can tell (it’s not said outright), Kadou is gay, Evemer bisexual, and there’s also background queer characters, including an asexual character and several third gender characters. No one raises an eyebrow over any of this, though Kadou does talk about the potential to be married off to forge an alliance, and it could be a man or a woman, despite his preferences. I’ve read the author intended this as a standalone story, yet the ending is very open for sequels. I did feel the ending was a bit rushed, with that slow burn going from our heroes barely acknowledging attraction to instalove in the last third of the book. I didn’t feel like we saw them falling in love, but we were told it happened instead of seeing it build up from their POVs. Things end rather abruptly too, and I felt robbed that the Sultan didn’t learn about their relationship, because you know a big sister is going to have an opinion over her little brother’s love life, even if she wasn’t the Sultan. It felt more like “Happy for Now” instead of “Happily Ever After”. I would read another book set in this world. Either a sequel or one with new characters in this setting would be worth a read. Hopefully, they’ll use the same cover artist, because this one was gorgeous and drew my attention before I read the summary. ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.