2024 romantic SF, fourth of what was originally a planned trilogy but
will now get at least one more book. Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren,
with an unbreakable psychic bond that's led the psi-hungry emperor to
put a bounty on their heads, flee to a planet that should offer sanctuary…
So on one level this is more of the same: Vesper and Kyrion
alternate viewpoints, try to strengthen the practical side of their
bond and generally power themselves up to overcome the huge opposition
arrayed against them. We also get a close-up view of Erzton, the major
power bloc that hasn't had much page time so far in the series.
And certainly we get all those things, with some predictable progress
and some unexpected opposition. But I found myself also noticing that
the truebond is an effective metaphor for the idea of the One True
Partner that is all over some romance novels: in the earlier books
everyone just assumed that if one half or a bond died the other would
waste away and die, but this whole thing is a rare phenomenon and one
not much discussed, and there are several more possibilities.
Including being truebonded to a person you don't particularly like,
and the various reasons why a bond might not develop as fully as the
ideal standard that's all we've heard about before. I don't want to
say it's a surprisingly deep thing to consider, because there's a
whole lot to modern romance beyond insta-lust, argument, happily ever
after, but this is the same person who produced the horribly
derivative urban fantasy Spider's Bite back in 2010…
I like the main characters together more than I like them apart, and
Vesper in particular seems a bit too eager to rush off on her own. But
I'm also enjoying seeing the development of secondary characters, and
if I can predict where that's going to end up it's still pleasant to
see how it drifts in the inevitable direction.
I'm continuing to enjoy this series.