The third and final of my purchases from the now defunct Hedone Press, which unfortunately means you can only get this via Audible at the moment. I participate in this r/Fantasy’s yearly Bingo as well as the r/QueerSFF Reading Challenge, of which one of the prompts is ‘Sapphic Swashbuckler’ which this book definitely fits. However, I think this book does a poor job of marketing what it actually is, which is mostly a fantasy romance on a pirate ship, with only a smattering of the horror story I thought I was walking into. Actually, don’t read the official blurb at all. I started sketching out my initial thoughts for this review at page 100 (of 180), and the blurb spoils a major plot event that hadn’t happened yet.
The Premise:
Gloria Vane is an aspiring con woman, though mostly because it’s the path in life her uncle has set for her. On her way to swindle a new husband in America, she gets captured by pirates, immediately pisses off half the crew, and starts romantically taunting the captain Valentina Mallozzi. This book isn’t quite action, isn’t quite a romance, isn’t quite adventure, but something living in a space between all three.
Read If Looking For: sapphic pirates with a strong romance subplot, jealous crewmates, magic that isn’t always explainable
Avoid If Looking For: gore, terror, or grotesqueness, detailed sex scenes
What Worked for Me
I’m always a fan of when authors write characters who aren’t good at everything and then make those weaknesses meaningful and relevant to the story. Vane is a spy in training, a con woman, a manipulator. She gets to use that toolkit a few times throughout the story. She also can’t fight and doesn’t know the first thing about sailing. While combat isn’t a huge portion of this story, it comes up enough that I felt like Lindz wasn’t holding her protagonist’s hand in the rough spots, nor did she let Vane survive scenes unscathed when it wasn’t warranted. The approach helps with tension, because the stakes feel real and the victories earned.
As a gay man, I have a bias towards romance plotlines involving two dudes. You can’t avoid heterosexual ones, of course, almost every mainstream novel has them. Sapphic fantasy dominated my transition into more ambitious types of Fantasy (my eternal gratitude towards Nghi Vo, Tamsyn Muir, and Seth Dickenson for shepherding my taste forward), but they rarely focused on a developing relationship. When it comes to romance-forward books, I’ll almost always spring for the gay one. Acknowledging that, I really liked how McLeod wrote Vane and Mallozzi’s arc. Great banter, good sense of tension that breaks at appropriate times, acknowledging the Romance tropes that work well without being beholden to them. And if it works for me, it’ll probably work for most people whose gut instinct isn’t to run away from romance plotlines like they were plague rats. Lindz’s backlog seems pretty diverse, but she really knocked the Romance portion of the story out of the park.
What Didn’t Work for Me
Let’s take a second to talk about branding. This book is named after a famously bloody weapon that also gets used for torture. The cover art shows leaking blood and has a stark red and black color pallette. The opening scene involves Vane watching a flogging on a merchant ship, fascinated by how the skin opened like butter. Everything about this is screaming nautical horror, which the blurb of the book reflects. It turns out … that the pirate crew is actually pretty loath to kill people, and Vane’s punishment for breaking rules and mouthing off is chores and a spanking. Even when our plucky protagonist earns the ire of several crew members, the worst that happens is a fistfight and a pretty tame assassination attempt. If you’re going to make me think this is a horror book, give me horror! This isn’t even like The Flesh of the Sea (same publisher) where the horror simply put on a cozy set of clothing. This just … didn’t feature horror elements for the vast majority of the book. The final product was an enjoyable story about a woman adapting to pirate life, even if the prose didn’t grip me by the throat and threaten me with a good time. Match your marketing to your book please! I anticipate this is more Hedone Press’s fault than Lindz’s, but I do not think the people picking this book up are getting what they signed up for.
Otherwise, this book is fine. It doesn’t tackle too much for a novella, it’s pleasantly plot focused. The characters aren’t cardboard cutouts, even if they don’t have a ton of depth. It’s the type of story I’m not mad at reading, but that also isn’t making me want to hunt down more books by the author. In two months, I don’t think I’m going to remember this one much. Ironically, the sparse horror elements were quite enjoyable. I think the novella would have been more successful had Lindz introduced that element earlier and developed it as the main focus of the story.
Conclusion: good horror and romance, but unfortunately neither was the prime focus of the story, which was more tepi
Marked for Plot 