Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2021

Category: Fantasy

Summary: For ten years, I’ve lived in a gilded cage inside King Midas’s golden castle. But one night changed everything.

Now I’m here, a prisoner of Fourth Kingdom’s army, and I’m not sure if I’m going to make it out of this in one piece. They’re marching to battle, and I’m the bargaining chip that will either douse the fire or spark a war.

At the heart of my fear, my worry, there’s him—Commander Rip.

Known for his brutality on the battlefield, his viciousness is unsurpassed. But I know the truth about what he is.

Fae.

The betrayers. The murderers. The ones who nearly destroyed Orea, wiping out Seventh Kingdom in the process. Rip has power sizzling beneath this skin and glinting spikes down his spine. But his eyes—his eyes are the most compelling of all.

When he turns those black eyes on me, I feel captive for an entirely different reason.

I may be out of my cage, but I’m not free, not even close. In the game of kings and armies, I’m the gilded pawn. The question is, can I out maneuver them?

My thoughts: Just as I did with Gild, I am going to approach this book as a runaway indie success about self-actualization, empowerment and trauma recovery with a hefty helping of thrilling intrigue and spicy romance. That is how it was sold to me, that is how it is advertised, and that is largely the reputation that it has in book communities. To start the review by being nice, I will say that there is a drastic reduction in the amount of rape, rape threats, and gratuitously exploitative content in Glint compared to the last book. On the other hand, though, this is the book where Auren’s character development is really supposed to take off, and all I can say is that I think readers will find her journey plausible and impactful if they think that Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury is the epitome of a nuanced, believable story of healing and psychological growth.

In Glint, Auren realizes how bad it is to be one man’s prisoner by being another man’s prisoner. Again, this displays roughly the same understanding of trauma and recovery as Rhysand abusing Feyre in ACOTAR to “keep her strong” or protect her or however else the narrative and fans perform wild logical leaps and contortions to justify his actions. Here we see Auren steal a couple of kegs of wine, have one fighting lesson, interact with some hastily-sketched caricatures, wander around camp endlessly and be regularly condescended to by Commander Rip (lol). Then Rip tells her to stop letting Midas smother the flame burning within her and she suddenly sees past years of horrific abuse, grooming and manipulation just in time for a final, dramatic showdown with Midas. She even gets to share some banter with Osrik about how funny it was that he threatened to whip her!

As I said with the first book, I’m not a stickler for pacing or having a jam-packed plot. But if a book isn’t carried by a well-developed plot, it should be carried by something else, preferably characterization, relationships, world-building or prose. Glint is not carried by any of these things – and can I just say that the number of Goodreads reviews describing the writing as lyrical is concerning to me? The writing features a plethora of unsuccessful metaphors and similes, basic grammar issues and ungainly attempts at complex language. This book is just trashily, inexplicably, morbidly entertaining in the way that this subgenre of new fantasy romance/ romantasy always is. I will 100% continue to read this series on those merits, but it’s deeply frustrating to me that it receives such acclaim for its deeper messages and feminist power when I simply don’t think it succeeds at all on those terms.