When Princess Mireille is married off to a foreign king with sinister intentions, she expects cruelty, not chains. Trapped within her own kingdom's walls and caught between two powerful immortal beings, she must reckon with her father's buried sins, her own dwindling soul, and the question of whether she was ever truly free to begin with.
My Review
Thank you so much to Scarlett Press for the ARC!
The tagline for Souls in Ruin is “When the gods demand obedience, do not kneel.” Princess Mireille spends most of this book kneeling. Literally and metaphorically. To divine men who imprison, abuse, and manipulate her, while her inner monologue insists, repeatedly, that she is strong. The irony is not subtle, and I don’t think it’s intentional.
I knew going in that this was a dark book. I was prepared for dark. What I wasn’t prepared for was how thoroughly the narrative romanticizes what it’s depicting. There is no romance here, just Stockholm syndrome dressed up in fantasy trappings and marketed as romantasy. Definitely read the trigger warnings before hand. 70% of the book is pure torture. I felt genuinely awful for the FMC throughout, and yet I could not stop reading, which says something about the pacing if nothing else.
The critique I keep coming back to: Mireille’s so-called awakening doesn’t come from within. It arrives after she drinks one of the MMC’s blood, which means her power is still on loan from a man, just a supernatural one this time. For a book that wants to position her as someone who won’t kneel, it works very hard to keep her on her knees and frame that as the necessary path to becoming herself. I really hope in book 2 she chooses herself because none of these men deserve her.
The world-building is also thin to the point of distraction. I don’t usually need exhaustive lore, but I finished this book with basic structural questions unanswered. A little more grounding would have gone a long way.
And then there’s Death. I switched to audio for a few chapters and his audiobook narrator has the single most absurdly attractive voice I have ever heard, and I have fully defected. I am Team Death now. His arc is the thread I’m most curious to follow into book two, and honestly, he’s the reason I’ll probably pick it up.