Hi everyone! I finished reading Ruinsong by Julia Ember last night and I have some THOUGHTS. As always, if you can, please just click on my blog and give the post a like if you wouldn't mind (https://livaug11.wixsite.com/book-review). Spoilers ahead, but there is a TL;DR at the bottom.
Ruinsong by Julia Ember is a story about a mage named Cadence with a magical voice who is forced by the queen to use it for evil and a noble girl named Remi who hates the queen and wants to bring her down. Given that this is a sapphic story, we know that they are in love with each other - Cadence and Remi knew each other when they were younger and Remi is explicitly stated to only be attracted to women.
As far as plots go? 5/5. Excellent idea, sapphic friends to enemies to lovers, French Revolution feel, magical voices. All great.
However, I have a bunch of problems with this book. The first is that it is VERY white. I mean there is not one person in the book who is explicitly stated to be a POC. Cadence and the queen are both described as having pale skin and based on the cover art, Remi is also white. Most of the other named characters don’t have a skin color stated, so techinically Ember could claim that there were POC but it irritates me that she didn’t state it explicitly when she did so for Cadence and the queen.
Additionally, the plot resolves with one of my LEAST favorite tropes: killing the henchman while leaving the boss alive. After killing the queen’s biggest helper Ren, Cadence chooses to cut the queen’s (who is also a mage) vocal cords, stripping her of her power rather than kill her. But this leaves a bit of a plot hole in my opinion because it is stated earlier (I’m 90% sure about this) that even mages who lose their voice don’t lose their magic, so Cadence actually didn’t strip her of her powers and has definitely left the door wide open for an epic comeback by the queen, which just feels like lazy writing to me. Like, girl you could have solved all your problems by just killing her and you didn’t? It’s not like Cadence has never killed anybody before either, in case you were thinking “well that seems mean - killing is wrong and you shouldn’t force her to kill. She was being benevolent!” Like I said before, Cadence kills Ren, the henchman who made her life terrible, but she also has an outburst about halfway through the book that ends up leaving a bunch of guards and a high ranking official dead for literally no other reason than she had a temper tantrum. This was another source of irritation for me. At the same time that Cadence was having temper tantrums and being rebellious against the queen by sneaking out to heal a rebel at a hospital nearby she was claiming that she couldn’t fight back against the powerful queen because the queen would make her life a living hell. Girl you just blew up her guards and you’re secretly learning defensive magic! If she didn’t kill you for all the little outbursts you’ve had so far then you’re probably good! This doesn’t really fly with Remi, who takes no shit and just fucking stabs the queen with a poisoned hatpin to incapacitate her, which was honestly very badass.
Furthermore, there was definitely something that felt a little off about overthrowing a queen that had overthrown a corrupt monarchy? The people doing the overthrowing are the nobles who, in all fairness, had been very much assholes to the commoners and the mages, but at the same time that just feels incorrect?? And I fully understand that they ended up installing a democracy at the end and that the queen was bad, and it’s even acknowledged that she was worse for the peasants too, but it felt a lot like “look at us, the noble, highly educated people, saving the poor stupid peasants who don’t know what they’re doing!” There’s not necessarily anything wrong with it per se but it definitely didn’t feel right.
While I think this was relevant to the plot, I didn’t enjoy reading the descriptions of Cadence boiling a boy alive from the inside out and I REALLY hated reading about her dog, Nip, dying. Nip felt like the one bright spot in her life/in the book and he died in like the first four chapters, which kinda sucked.
Anyway, Cadence’s wishy-washyness bothered me a lot, I didn’t like how white the book was, the dog died which always sucks, and don’t try and act like you’re so morally superior to the queen who killed the previous queen by leaving her alive when you’ve already killed a shit ton of people for literally no good reason and there’s absolutely no advantage to you leaving her alive because you’re not suddenly morally redeemable for not killing the boss and all she’s gonna do is cause more problems for you because taking her voice doesn’t take her power and you know this!!! What the fuck Cadence!!
TL;DR: romance gets a 3/5, plot gets a 5/5, execution gets a 3/5.
Faber est suae quisque fortunae.
Every man is the artisan of his own fortune.
