Lemonade Book Reviews

I saw this book getting hyped in female-led non-romantasy fantasy circles, so I wanted to give it a try. It was solidly decent. There were a lot of things I liked that I can talk about without spoiling the book, such as the fact that it starts with a big glossary of names and how to pronounce them. I know how to pronounce some Irish names, like Aoife and Pátraic, but I was not going to get Turlough (Anglicization based on the book) from Tairdelbach. I really appreciated an official glossary with all the names I would need for the book. It would be nice if future books also included a pronunciation guide for different locations, but I’ll take my wins where I can get them and the locations are generally googlable. I also appreciated the commitment to preserving a relatively accurate timeline. I don’t love how the book was paced (I felt like we never got to witness any actual build up to what Fódla and Gormflaith were doing), but I don’t think the actual length of the timeline was the issue. Lawless clearly did her research on what it was like to live in Ireland at the end of the 10th century, and I want to commend that. Rónnat was a cool character and I wish she was on page more, but unfortunately that would move the plot too quickly. The political machinations were also interesting, and I think there’s a lot to sink your teeth into with the characters.

That marks the extent of what I really liked about the book, unfortunately. Both of our POV characters had the narrative version of iPhone face because of the language choices Lawless made. I am, unfortunately, pretentious and I like when the language in high fantasy/historical fantasy novels is a bit archaic or stiff. I don’t want to feel like I’m reading a book set in 2026 because 2026 sucks absolute balls. I did eventually get used to the tone, but it took me out of the story at the beginning.

I was either neutral towards or actively disliked most of the characters, and I couldn’t really connect with either POV character. A lot of the characters in Dublin/Gormflaith’s plot felt really one dimensional, probably because most of those characters actually existed and their motivations were beholden to the historical record. I also don’t think the POVs had super distinct voices, which can be an issue when you’re writing dual POV first person. If the character was angry, it was Gormflaith, and if she was sad, it was Fódla. It kind of felt like both of them just popped into the world as adults – despite hearing about both Gormflaith’s and Fódla’s childhoods, I kept forgetting their origin stories from before the beginning of the book.

I read this book in three big spurts and I never really felt the urge to pick it back up and see what was happening in between spurts. The first two spurts had Easter between them, so I was pretty busy, but I wasn’t so engaged in the plot that I wanted to ignore my family to read (which is what I did while reading Realm of the Elderlings at Thanksgiving and Christiamas). That said, I probably will pick up the sequel and give it a shot. The story had good bones, and I think if Gormflaith or Fódla go through character development I will have a better time. I can’t talk about that without spoilers, though, sooooooo

WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.

It’s hard to read a book when you don’t like the person who’s head you’re in. I struggled with Gormflaith and Fódla for very different reasons. Gormflaith felt a bit flat to me and kind of like if you put Aelin Galathynius in 10th century Ireland. She loves her son and she’s a schemer. I think if you’re really into girlboss feminism, you will unironically love her. She could be really interesting if there was more depth to her story, but as it stands now she just isn’t very fleshed out. Her motivations are that she wants power. Also, I’m like 99% sure that this was intentional on Lawless’s part, but Gormflaith thinks mortal women are even further beneath her than mortal men. Here’s one example of Gormflaith being casually misogynistic from the beginning of the book:

‘It’s not like you to worry so much about murdered nuns,’ I hushed. ‘They are dried-up old hags with foul breath and no hair.’ – Gormflaith, page 45 of the Kindle edition

If she really hated the oppression of women that much, I don’t think she would hate women. Once again, I think character development will help here. I can see a path where Gormflaith continues to be evil and crazy and then dies because of it, but that’s a boring story. I think seeing the actual ideological conflict between the Tuatha de Danaan and the Fomorians could also help, because it seems like the Descendants are kind of evil and them also being evil can make Gormflaith’s arc more interesting.

With Fódla, my issues are more on the level of crafting story arcs. Fódla is a woman who has experienced roughly 80 years of emotional abuse from her husband. They had a child together, and he also emotionally abused that child. He is in a position of power in their extremely tight-knit society. By the end of the book, Fódla has finally realized that maybe Tomas isn’t right about humans and is himself not a great dude. I understand on a human level why Fódla hasn’t seen through Tomas’s abuse, because he’s essentially been brainwashing her to mistrust anyone outside of their society for the majority of her life and emotional abuse is a motherfucker. I also want to emphasize that there is no time limit on healing in real life. However, this is a book and Fódla is a character. Within one book, we would expect her to have a complete emotional arc (that also sets us up for future arcs in later books, not trying to say she should have finished all her development by now). That doesn’t happen in my opinion. From the language used, it seemed like Fódla was still kind of confused on whether or not Tomas is bad. She was still fighting with the idea that human men are all evil. It didn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion to Fódla’s arc in the book, especially because we never get any real resolution on what specifically happened to cause Aoife to run off with Rónnat. It feels like Fódla finally thinks “wait… human men aren’t all murdering people all the time? maybe Tomas was wrong” and then the book ends. It was the sort of language that makes me think she’s still going to be questioning if he’s wrong for a significant portion of the next book. It’s frustrating because the audience knows she’s going to learn this lesson. If she doesn’t, she won’t develop as a character. We see that Fódla has people in her life who are more important to her than Tomas AND that she knows Tomas isn’t actually perfect but she doesn’t even consider he was lying to her about humans being terrible until the very end of the book. In my opinion, this requires the audience to suspend their disbelief to an extent where mine breaks. Once again, this is not a commentary on people healing from IRL abuse (my heart goes out to y’all) but a commentary on my lack of satisfaction with her arc.

Additionally, I have a couple miscellaneous reasons why the slowness of the plot with Tomas frustrates me. One, it seems obvious that we’re heading for love triangle territory. I think drawing out this plot means we can draw out Fódla and Murchad falling in love longer. I like Murchad and I am not philosophically opposed to love triangles, but I have read a lot of them and developed discerning tastes. Who will Fódla end up with, obviously shitty guy from her “hometown” or obviously nice guy who’s a different race than her? It’s not a new take. I also think it’s really interesting that race and gender cannot be extricated here: Fódla hates human men because she believes they’re all murdering rapists. Lawless is Irish, but this reflects a real life mindset in America of how some white women treat and think about black men. This book doesn’t interact with real-life race very much (it’s more concerned about Descendants vs Fomorians vs humans), and (once again) Lawless is not American, so I don’t know if that was her intention. It did really make me side eye Fódla though. I was also side eyeing her because she believes all violence is bad/unnecessary and that’s why she’s judging humans. Glad your race has never hunted another one to extinction, Fódla!

Like I said about Gormflaith, my real issue here is character development. I think Fódla has the ability to grow and realize she was wrong about humans and to kick Tomas to the curb, but she hasn’t even gotten through the part of the arc where she realized Tomas genuinely sucks. I definitely think it’s possible that a lot more character development will happen in the next two books in the trilogy, so I’m hopeful these issues can be resolved. Putting Gormflaith and Fódla in close proximity will at the very least make the conflict between the Descendants and the Fomorians more relevant, since we didn’t get much of it in this book.

I also think we can focus more closely on politics in Munster now that both of our POV characters are in Munster, which is needed. Maybe it’s just because the book is told from the perspective of structurally disempowered women, but it felt like a lot happened without us being very invested in it happening or not. The entire climax of the book felt weird and a bit anticlimatic because I didn’t really feel a strong connection to Sitric, Brian, or Sechnall. Gormflaith doesn’t see anyone else around her as a person, so we don’t get much of a sense of the other characters in her scenes (with the exception of maybe Olaf). Fódla is terrified of every man except Lonán (RIP) and Murchad, so we get a better sense of who the characters are in her chapters, but they’re still relatively flat. I know there’s more to the story and they’ll likely get fleshed out, but your characters should be fleshed out even if they haven’t gone through character development yet.

Overall, the novel feels very modern and that’s not a good thing. I mentioned the modern language, but the real issue to me is how the book ended and how first books in series have been ending in the 2020s in general. I was a bigggggg Romantasy reader in the 2010s (before it was marketed as Romantasy), and then I kind of stopped reading my last couple years of college and first couple years of grad school. I feel like a trend I’ve seen with a lot of new releases is having a series long arc but no book long arc. Because of this, the first book is a lot of exposition about the world and the characters with a sprinkling of plot that ends relatively abruptly. It feels like a combination of tactics Netflix uses to get you to binge watch 10 hours of TV in one night and Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas really taking off. By ending the book on an abrupt cliffhanger where you don’t resolve your plotlines, you get people invested in buying the next book so that they can resolve the tension within themself. This happens instead of following a more traditional story structure where you have a climax and falling action and you have to trust that readers will want to keep reading the story. This is also a massive issue I have with Netflix reality shows (there’s a reason they don’t end Survivor episodes right before they reveal who’s getting voted out), but that’s neither here nor there.

I ran a Sarah J Maas blog on Tumblr back in the day as Throne of Glass was still coming out. The series was huge in online bookish circles even before the pandemic, and I feel like it led to a surge in “lost princess” type storylines that replaced the YA dystopian surge that followed The Hunger Games. Mild spoiler alert for Throne of Glass: the first two books are a relatively narrow third person perspective on Celaena Sardothien (NOT googling if I spelled that right), and then there’s a big reveal at the end of book 2 that leads to the scope of the world widening for the rest of the books. It works in the Throne of Glass series for a few reasons, the most important one being that there are distinct arcs to book 1 and 2 that are engaging to read. The first two books have more of a YA tone, so people who are reading Throne of Glass as adults for the Romantasy parts tend not to like those books as much, but for a 14 year old girl (AKA the intended age range for the people reading the books) they’re fine. They also set up plotlines and worldbuilding that were very important to the conclusion of the series. I love a slow paced book, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with first books being generally slower paced and having more exposition than the rest of the books in a series, but I do have an issue with books cutting off stories in the middle.

That kind of got away from me, but I had a fine time reading The Children of Gods and Fighting Men. If this book sticks in my head, I will read the sequel because I think there’s good bones here. It just happens to falls prey to one of my biggest pet peeves in modern literature.