Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Priestess, a fantasy romance from Kara Reynolds, started off with considerable promise, but started flagging like a hobby horse in a three-legged foot race pretty soon. We follow Edie, a 38-year-old scribe, who has rebuilt her life after fleeing an abusive past. She’s found some years of happiness, before her new home is invaded and she and her fellow scribesses become prisoners of war.
I love the fact that the FMC is older (my history with infuriating romantasy FMCs is well documented) and Edie being older and more experienced was a much nicer FMC to read about. While she’s still quite infantile in her romantic relationship, she shines more in her female friendships.
I think this book’s greatest strength lies in it’s platonic female relationships as the strength and clarity of those relationships far outweigh the romantic ones. The ‘girl gang’ dynamics are strong and feel genuinely comforting, like the author was healing some painful part of herself by writing it into this story. The feeling of a shared sisterhood is strong and rooted in trauma bonding, which makes it feel familiar to the lived experience of women everywhere.
In some ways, it’s almost sad that with such strong female friendships carrying Edie through the challenges of her life — escaping an abusive husband, family and country to rebuild a life after barely surviving the journey — she still yearns so strongly for a man to ‘complete her’. Yes, I get that it’s a romance book, and yes, I get that the basic premise of the genre is ‘character A finds character B attractive and wants to get jiggy with them’ but… but but but… still 😮💨
And it’s not like Edie really leans on her friends when she’s struggling in her romantic entanglement either, so the support and friendship only flows one way with her. That made Edie feel incredibly selfish, because while she was always ready to step up for her friends, she wasn’t willing to let them do that in return. And, yes again, I understand that miscommunication was at the heart of the romantic relationship in this story, but why then put such strong female friendships around her? Yes, I also understand that perfectionism in women — service at the detriment to yourself — is a thing, but in the case of this book it felt like it took a lot of big concepts and then applied parts of them strategically (aka when it suited the plot) and discarded the rest of them as unimportant.
The prose is very lit fic, sometimes to the point of detriment when the info dumps get too big, but it’s definitely a vibe. While we’re talking more classic fantasy than your typical romance prose here, it doesn’t insist upon itself so much that it’s out of reach for the broader romance-reading audience (by which I’m not saying romance readers are incapable of reading high fantasy prose, but referring to the fact that, as a genre, romance prose tends to be more immediate and less esoteric). It’s atmospheric in the beginning and there’s some poetic quality to the romance as it develops, but none of it holds up once the structural issues become more and more glaring.
When it starts to fall apart, it really falls apart.
But let me start at the beginning; the romance is a slow burn, and at least the slow part of the slow burn was mostly satisfying. The miscommunication became plot device-y around halfway through the romance arc, but by then the structural issues start looming large and detract attention from the romance issues.
I think the MMC, Alric, was well written as the aloof and by-the-book grumpy counterpart to Edie’s sunshine. He goes from a man who kidnaps her to someone who feels genuinely charming in his awkward way of communicating. While a lot of the back-and-forth between Edie and Alric was very satisfying, their personable exchanges revealing character depth even when world events and plot elements really start to sputter, the bar for communication between mature adults was incredibly low. This is where the cracks show, when they’ve both been set up as such mature adults, yet when it comes to this one relationship they suddenly behave like petulant children.
I think the miscommunication trope wasn’t well grounded and stood in awkward contrast between how the characters were otherwise portrayed. The reasoning behind their churlishness came with no redeeming moments — mature adults can and do behave as utter idiots on occasion — but I was left sorely missing that full circle.
And while I was utterly charmed by the dismissive MMC (yeah, hi, have you met me?) that was kind of done under protest, because him kidnapping her and Edie then being forced to marry him was never really addressed. Edie was already being charmed by him while she was his prisoner and the little things he did to earn her regard were the absolute bare minimum, the whole thing reading very Stockholm syndrome-y (and not in that intentional Lolita way, something I’ve complained about with another book here). Once the “couple” is ordered to be married, we very quickly skim over the challenges of the start of the relationship and jump straight to falling for each other.
And at this point I have to bring up the rape (or near-rape, I can’t remember which). While the women are being held prisoner, one of them gets raped by one of the soldiers under Alric’s command. Now this is an elite company that is supposed to be held to a higher standard, so when they realise what’s happening the offending soldier is quickly dragged out and Alric slits his throat.
So, we’ve established that rape = bad and rapists deserve instant death. But what about when a prisoner of war is forced to marry her kidnapper? Is that not a form of abuse or exploitation? In the story it is framed as punishment, but punishment that turns into pleasure and love in all three “romances”.
While the ‘girl gang’ has worked to heal a lot of past trauma (horrible things that were done to them), they do sadly little to process or heal from the events they experienced as a group. This is a strange dichotomy that’s saying it’s fine to ignore abuses experienced in the now if you’ve got a good friend group that bonded over trauma originally? There’s even a healing arc for the lesbian couple, where they finally find their place in the world, after having lived in secrecy for a long time, but the only solution to the most recent trauma the group gets is that they end up married…?
I struggle to wrap my head around this logic. And maybe that’s where the indie published nature of this book becomes really clear. Because I can’t help but think if a publisher took this to task, cleaned up the formatting issues and the rambling prose, and rounded out the arcs in a more solid way, there would be a much tighter story in there, much more impactful.
Because as the story progressed, the balance between epic fantasy elements and personal story became increasingly unbalanced. World events that didn’t directly pertain to Edie were brought up, but presented as no more than fodder for the page as the story skimmed over large swathes of time to move things along (why not just skip that?). Here, the SFF reader in me was missing the things mentioned being brought in as genuine plot points that change the world in tangible ways, rather than just a laundry list of things that are happening Out There Somewhere. Despite writing strong dialogue (especially in the beginning), the author doesn’t make use of this, instead opting for pushing it all into exposition, which further diminishes their importance to the story of Edie.
The best way I can describe it is that the story suffers from a “broken focus”, like a camera with a damaged lens still taking pictures, and this fracturing becomes more clear the further into the story we get.
And do not get me started on the horse stuff. (Just kidding, I’m pissed.)
First of all, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, do not feed your horse ferns. They can kill your horse. No, not all ferns, but enough ferns. Do 👏 not 👏 do 👏 it 👏
Also, do not, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, so casually have two people repeatedly (or at all) riding a single horse. Yes, I understand while the soldiers are trekking across the countryside this might have been a thing they did, but if this is really such an elite squad, they would have had a much better understanding of the value of their horses to move through terrain quickly and effectively.
A soldier then ruining his own horse by using it like a motorbike, makes absolutely no sense in the internal logic of the story, nor in external logic of the real world because that is how you maim a horse. And also, I’d like to know how they so comfortably fit into one single saddle. What kind of saddle is this? Like a sofa? On the horse’s back?
No modern saddle is a two-person affair. One saddle seats one person comfortably. That’s it. It shapes your position and your seat to better distribute the load of the rider across the horse’s back. And even if we’re talking about more historical style saddles, they’re even tighter and grip the rider more firmly in place than modern saddles do.
If you’re going to have two people ride a saddled horse, one person is perching on the horn (ouch!) if they’re in the front. If the second person is sitting behind the rider, they’re sitting behind the cantle of the saddle on the saddle pad and making direct contact with the least load-bearing part of the horse’s back. And if there’s gear there (as you’d expect a travelling soldier to have) or one person (as was the case at least a few times) is wearing a sword, this gets infinitely more complicated. Again, that horse is a goner after this and should only ever be used in an absolute emergency where you know the horse (and maybe you) aren’t coming out of it alive.
If you love your horse, two fully grown adults on its back is not something you will ever do. End of. There’s even once instance where Edie says she can ride her own horse, but Alric insists they take his prised mare fOr ThE rOmAnCe. It isn’t sexy to get your yayas at the expense of another living creature. And yes, I realise the horse in this case is fictional, but I think we can contribute less to the normalisation and romanisation of animal abuse, and still enjoy our fiction just as much (more, we’ll enjoy it more).
No. Just no. Anything to do with horses in this book. Absolute no.
Anyway, back to the structural issues.
After a prophecy revelation somewhere after the midpoint, the narrative loses its tether to the characters just when that connection should be strongest. The third act seems to be nothing more than a bunch of loose plot lines tied together very loosely.
The fact that Edie’s previous husband was the one spearheading the conquest of Tintar (and that he’d been searching for her the whole time?) was plot convenient and unnecessary. I could have lived without ever having met him. (Although, I have to wonder if naming him Thrush is a joke. I know it was bird related, but that’s not the only meaning of the word.)
The whole invasion of Tintar to begin with, felt like an obvious plot device to move the story forward – why wax poetic so often of the might of Tintar as a nation if this was all just going down the drain? (This is what I mean with when I said that large plot elements got mentioned and then subsequently glossed over. Absolutely infuriating.)
Then there was this whole ‘look at me subverting the chosen one’ trope that made the book really unbalanced. Edie begins the book by saying she isn’t a religious woman, she ends the book by saying the same thing but through the lens of Alzheimer’s (so she’s kind of regressing to the Edie we met at the beginning of the book?) making the whole thing incredibly circular and not in a satisfying way.
She then finds faith and a kind of religion when a goddess speaks directly to and through her, but her power is not within her but in a stone that is imbued with someone else’s spirit (the spirit of a man). This undermines Edie’s power and diminishes her final “act of bravery” into her being the victim of larger machinations, yet again.
The book paradoxically covers very little ground while simultaneously spanning decades by its conclusion. Long stretches where nothing meaningful happens are followed by rushed resolutions of major plot points. The climax feels anticlimactic, robbed of power by earlier pacing problems. Character development that should be significant — like losing the ability to communicate with her goddess, or adapting to life with one hand — is brushed over in mere sentences.
By the epilogue we’re just slapping shit up.
Or that’s what it feels like. Because it basically just goes “and four score and seven years later all the men are dead”. Not a single one of these “loves of their lives” survive. Only the women do and we’re back to where we started – these women surviving the world by the power of community. And not even community they could only have found in their new home, the very community they brought with them from their old home.
The ending provides an outsider’s perspective on events rather than meaningful conclusion from the protagonist herself, delivered by someone who admits to not understanding the central relationship I spent the entire fucking book following. I… what?
This book exemplifies “vibes over substance” — perfectly suited to an era where aesthetics often matter more than content depth. It offers comfort reading for those who want to read about female friendship dynamics and taboo-adjacent romance (here the straight women with their love of ‘why choose’ rears its head), but don’t really want material that is thought-provoking enough to bring you face to face with some uncomfortable personal truths.
I have seen the response this book has gotten, how so many readers have found the female friendships and sense of sisterhood healing, and I think that’s wonderful, but it just doesn’t cut it for me personally.
This book occupies a middle ground between romance and epic fantasy without fully committing to either and, in doing so, misses out on the strength of both genres. However, even though I didn’t like a lot about it, I think the book tackles many topics that are important to talk about and write about.
Romance as a genre has always been that place where women have been able to read about the thoughts and experiences of other women, come across topics and themes that they don’t necessarily come across in day-to-day conversation.
The deep inspiration from classical art is evident in the way the book is written, the influence of medieval language supporting that romantisation of the fantasy world, showing that love for art throughout. There’s clearly a huge admiration of hand painted work as the main female characters are skilled in art and scribing (though the art itself in a more practical sense doesn’t really make much of an appearance in the book and I think I would have preferred to have seen Edie so some scribing rather than have read about her lounging in bed reading so much).
The violence against women is a big, important topic in this book. Specifically the systematic violence that keeps women leashed to obedience out of fear of retaliation. The box, though not experienced first hand in prose but in memory alone, was claustrophobic and humiliating in equal measure. I think that metaphor works on both a physical and psychological level, representing not only the immediate violence done to women, but the larger implications of a society that treats women (and everyone else found unacceptable by the strict, hierarchical standards) as an expendable resource and property.
I think in order for this book to have been satisfying to me, I would have liked to have seen a lot more of the darkness first hand. Because the book raises such dark beasts in the telling and then glosses over them with a fantasy rom-com vibe that is almost jarring in juxtaposition, leaving me feeling unsatisfied in how those beasts were tackled. But that’s me. Despite not loving this first instalment of this series, I’m intrigued to see what comes in the following books.
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
