Review: Oria’s Gambit by Jeffe Kennedy

Oria’s Gambit by Jeffe Kennedy
Formats available: ebook
Series: Sorcerous Moons #2
Pages: 198
on August 27th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

A Play For Power
Princess Oria has one chance to keep her word and stop her brother’s reign of terror: She must become queen. All she has to do is marry first. And marry Lonen, the barbarian king who defeated her city bare weeks ago, who can never join her in a marriage of minds, who can never even touch her—no matter how badly she wants him to.
A Fragile Bond
To rule is to suffer, but Lonen never thought his marriage would become a torment. Still, he’s a resourceful man. He can play the brute conqueror for Oria’s faceless officials and bide his time with his wife. And as he coaxes secrets from Oria, he may yet change their fate…
An Impossible DemandWith deception layering on deception, Lonen and Oria must claim the throne and brazen out the doubters. Failure means death— for them and their people.
But success might mean an alliance powerful beyond imagining...

My Review:

Oria’s Gambit picks up where Lonen’s War leaves off. This isn’t a sequel, it is a continuation of the same story. So if you love epic fantasy romance and have not yet read Lonen’s War, go forth and get a copy posthaste. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Also, and I don’t think this is a spoiler, Oria’s very dangerous gambit feels doomed to fail from the very beginning of the story. Not just because this is the middle book in a tetralogy (four scheduled books so far). If there are at least two more books, Oria can’t possibly succeed yet. There wouldn’t be enough story.

But also because Oria is still very much learning, both about politics in general and about her own power in particular. She’s still in the unfortunate position where she believes way too much of what she has been told, even as she proves it wrong at every turn.

And even though the people who taught her are selfish asshats who kept her power suppressed for their own gain. She needs more seasoning before she will be able to see through all the BS that she was indoctrinated with.

This is a story about the building of trust. It is also a story about figuring out that everything that you have been taught is wrong. And that just because someone says they are doing something for your own good, the reality is that they are acting for their own good and don’t give a damn if you get hurt along the way.

As the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. That is a good chunk of what happens between Lonen and Oria. They may not be sure of each other at first, but they both want what is best for all of their people. Oria, who has been barred from the circles of power in Bara, sees her homeland’s supreme selfishness as wrong. The Barans have been wasting water in a desert for centuries, using their superior magic to steal it from anyplace that cannot stand against them, without a care for how many people they destroy along the way.

It feels like there’s a worldwide water shortage on this planet, and the Barans are doing more than their fair share to make it worse. They don’t care who they kill or what they destroy as long as they can preserve their supposedly superior lifestyle.

And that’s the drama that plays out between Oria and the powers-that-want-to-continue-to-be in her homeland. Oria, with Lonen’s assistance, is doing her best to work within the system for a solution that has a chance of saving everyone. But the forces that have chosen to defend the status quo are willing to stoop to any means, including mass murder, to maintain their place at the top of the heap.

They see Oria and Lonen as traitors and collateral damage. It is going to take a miracle, and a catastrophe, not necessarily in that order, to change that perspective. If Oria survives.

Escape Rating A-: If you like epic political fantasy, this series is like crack. It has everything. Complex magic, political skullduggery, epic battle sequences, horrible monsters and a love story that looks like it is going to be one for the ages.

Oria and Lonen start out from a position where they don’t trust each other, and with good reason. They begin the story in Lonen’s War on opposite sides of a battlefield. But the more they are forced to work together the more they both discover that an honorable enemy makes a better friend than a treacherous ally.

Their marriage is intended to be a marriage of convenience. Oria requires a spouse in order to grab power before her immature, reckless, selfish and idiotic brother manages to claim it. Yar will be a tool of the priesthood, where Oria thinks for herself.

Oria believes that her power makes it impossible for anyone to touch her without making her faint from overload. That’s why she insists on a marriage of convenience. Lonen, knowing none of this but seeing her as the only way of saving his people, agrees.

But the more they work together, and the more time they spend together, the less sensible that marriage of convenience seems. Not just because Lonen wants the only prize he is likely to get after his conquering of Bara, but because the more they work at being allies, the more that Oria feels for her “barbarian” consort.

Watching her perspective change is marvelous. The seduction scene is beautiful and hot and still manages to respect the necessary boundaries that Oria has drawn around herself. The reader sees that those barriers are slowly falling, but Oria, appropriately for her character, isn’t there yet.

The story ends on a low note, as middle books so often do. Our hero and heroine face grave challenges ahead. I can’t wait to find out what happens next!

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