Charlotte Kersten

“You would have given me so much, in exchange for me giving up everything.”

Year published: 2021

Category: Fantasy novella

Representation: F/F, main couple and side character

Summary: Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.

Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate—and her own?

My thoughts: I believe there is a lot to be said in a story that explores abuse and colonialism at the same time – I think you could make the argument that both are fundamentally about unjust power and how it excuses itself and works through coercion, manipulation and violence. I was excited to read this book for that reason, but my main takeaway is that this story is just too short to dig deep into anything. The central idea conveyed with Eldris as the representation of an abuser and a colonizer is that Thanh is/has something that she wants; Eldris thinks she’s entitled to have things she doesn’t actually have the right to and she is willing to hurt people to get what she wants. That’s…kind of it (at least as far as I understood it) and I ended the book feeling like the author had just scratched the surface of the topic.

In principle, I also like the idea that Thanh is a very insecure character who grows in confidence over the course of the story, but I was also rather dissatisfied with the execution of this aspect too. The conflict is mainly with her mother; Thanh thinks that her mother doesn’t respect because she’s too quiet and timid, but over the course of the book she ends a meeting she’s heading to immediately go have public sex with the leader of the enemy contingent, gets blackmailed about it, makes huge diplomacy decisions behind her mother’s back and doesn’t consult her about deciding to threaten to burn Eldris and her contingent alive. So…is the problem really that she’s too quiet and timid? The entirety of the blackmail plot also never really made sense to me – when she approaches her mother about a possible marriage with Eldris, her mom is easily convinced that it’s a good idea and there is not really a reason to assume that anything else would have been the case instead.

The other main thread of the story is the romance between Thanh and the magical being Giang. Giang is an interesting character because she’s part complete naivety and innocence and part monster. However, I don’t feel like she works as a love interest because the length of the story allows for virtually no meaningful interaction between the two characters. She declares her love at the end of the story, and my only possible conclusion is that fire spirits have different attachment styles than humans do in this world! As a final point, I’m kind of miffed by the comparisons to The Goblin Emperor and Howl’s Moving Castle. There’s an insecure person at court and a fire elemental in Fireheart Tiger, but those are really the only points of overlap and the comparisons left me thinking that this story’s contents and tone were going to be very different from what they actually were.