Fiction Reviews
A Promise of Peridot
(2024) Kate Golden, Jo Fletcher Books, £20, hrdbk, 467pp, ISBN 978-1-529-43405-7
Book two of the 'Sacred Stones' romantasy series continues where A Dawn of Onyx left off. Fleeing the conquest of the Peridot provinces by enemy forces, Arwen Valondale and Kane Ravenwood seek sanctuary in the underwater Kingdom of Citrine. From there, they plot their next moves against Kane’s estranged father King Lazarus and his evil Fae armies.
While the emerging romance between Arwen and Kane had been going nicely, thank you very much, events at the end of book one mean that Peridot begins in a very different place.
Arwen is still reeling not only from the shock of unleashing her own Fae powers of mass destruction, but also from discovering that Kane has been keeping secrets from her. According to prophecy, she is the one fated to defeat Lazarus, but at the cost of her own life, as her brooding romantic interest has known all along.
This means that things between our co-protagonists are very frosty indeed, at least to start with. On top of that, the pair have to juggle dynastic politics, romantic rivals and the relationship challenges of friends and families, as well as running the gamut of perils mundane and magical.
Will they reunite? Will they find the McGuffin/Blade of the Sun they need to augment their fight back against Lazarus? Will several chapters towards the end of the book be taken up by Arwen and Kane’s eventual consummation of their fevered and plot-hampered desires?
The answers you seek are yes, yes and yes, yes, YES! Sadly, by that point this reviewer had long since checked out.
While I enjoyed the gonzo energy of Onyx somewhat, there was still a sense of a lot of fantastic tropes being thrown at the wall to mixed effect. Peridot continues that trend, but asks a lot more of Golden’s writing chops by moving away from the former’s gothic fortress setting. Our heroes tour a world of undersea vacation kingdoms, serpent dungeons and sleazy prison islands but these are locations without a sense of a coherent whole.
Golden neither leans into the silliness enough (protagonist called Arwen; countries named after gemstones) nor creates a setting in which you can suspend your disbelief. The end result is fantasy as backdrop, which in turn undermines the credibility of the romance, which remains the book’s strongest suit.
There is huge untapped potential for fantasy romance, as its close relative urban fantasy has shown. Fantasy could well do with an injection of character-led work and a focus on believable relationships, as a counterpoint to too much grimdark if nothing else. And romance, occasionally still denigrated as a literary category, needs no advocacy from me to establish its bona fides. But doing both things well at the same time ain’t a walk in the park.
If you enjoyed A Dawn of Onyx, I hope you will get something from A Promise of Peridot, since the joy and enthusiasm are still there on Golden’s part. But whether you chalk it up to second book syndrome or the increased difficulty setting of the plot, this didn’t do it for me I’m afraid.
Tim Atkinson
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]