2019 Ruritanian fantasy-romance, fourth of its series. Rozild is
dismissed from her post as a laundry maid for "unnatural behaviour",
but finds a new if parlous position as apprentice to a dressmaker.
This book is more or less contemporary with the events of Mother
of Winter, but carries on a little later, after the magical workings
of that book bring on a late but much-needed flooding of the river.
After all, with flood comes river fever…
In previous books our viewpoint has been with the well-off, perhaps at
risk of reputational ruin, but not in immediate danger of starvation.
Here it's all rather lower, with Rozild at constant risk of being
dismissed again to starve on the streets, and her friends in similarly
precarious situations. Which makes it a little unfortunate that the
tone of this one is rather more didactic, as Rozild for example has to
learn not to make some standard mistakes around someone with a
disability
But that's really the only failure as far as I'm concerned: we see a
little of the earlier books' main characters, and we've met these new
main characters before in passing, but this is really a separate story
that overlaps more than it is a continuation of the earlier narrative.
(Even so, there's little introduction for those earlier main
characters, so while you could start here and not be lost, things will
make more sense if you take the books in order..)
The romance is very slight, so don't read it for that, but for me this
was a welcome new view into the world of Alpennia. (This is also the
last book set there to have been released; at least three more novels
are planned, but there's no schedule for their publication.)