Normally I do a plot summary to start reviews, but really what’s the point? Lissa is awesome, faces absolutely no conflict or difficulty and is now ruling an entire functioning planet by wont of her Sueishness. Everything works out because it just does, there’s no conflict or complications and Lissa is just totally awesome and super powerful all the time.

Oh dear gods it gets worse. It actually gets worse

See, Lissa, the worst person of in the universe, Supreme Queen of Mary Sues is now in charge of an entire planet. She’s also, apparently An Adult.

But this adult who is the supreme all powerful dictator of a planet decides to run off and sulk every time things go wrong. Something happens she doesn’t like? She leaves the planet or goes back in time and pouts for a few weeks/months before coming back and deigning to rule her kingdom again. And absolutely no-one calls her on this shit. This woman is supposed to be, at least, well into her 40s. She behaves like a petulant teenager

Of course, everyone may be just happy to see her gone because she is an utterly terrible ruler whose planet would collapse were it not for the power of her Sueness and endless super powered lovers with god like abilities.

Her planet has absolutely no resources. She’s literally just moving a gazillion vampires and comesueli (proto-vampires which basically act as a slave race but no-one talks about that) to a planet with no industry, agriculture or industry but hey everything’s working out. And Lissa is micromanaging EVERYTHING. Sports, culture, nascent industry. Everything. She takes a day out of her schedule to help pick fruit with half her council for a winery. A single winery. She has an entire planet to manage and she spends pages concerned with this one winery run by one of her favourites because it’s going to shore up a PLANET WIDE ECONOMY. They make decisions on the economy and agriculture going forwards with no attempt to study what their planet or population can actually do – just “hey, let’s do this” and lo, they do.

She literally has a little snit because tourists will be coming to her capital and *gasp* photographing her palace. She seriously decides the capital city of her new planet will be closed off except for certain days when she can be out of the city and absolutely no-one questions either the draconian nature of this or how unworkable it is.

She has another snit because her counsellors raise the idea of tourism and gambling as a way to prop up her non-existent actual economy. Why? Because she doesn’t want such debauchery and dirty slutwhorejezebels on her planet!

So how does it not collapse? Because the author has decided it won’t. The comseuli are all magically becoming pregnant because they “somehow” know more of them will be needed. Oh and a sudden blood substitute has been invented which is convenient for a vampire planet. And the Reth Alliance – a kind of military and commercial union of several planets, has decided to accept them despite them having no infrastructure, military or, well, anything to offer at all (oh hey they may be able to produce wine and organic produce which there is a convenient demand for but they’re going to fund an entire planet’s economy on this?!) but hey join up they’re happy to have them.

Or the planet is HALF IN DARKNESS all the time which is super awesome for vampires but for some reason this doesn’t affect the temperature of the dark side or make it a frozen, pretty useless wasteland.

Of course a lot of this is helped by Lissa having the most ridiculous Sue collection of super powers ever. Not only can she travel through time and space and have infinite murder powers but she also has the ability to tell if someone is good or bad with a thought. She doesn’t even have to be in the presence of the person – she literally picks and chooses who is good or bad based on their RESUMES. (oh, and queen of the world? Is literally vetting every employee coming to her planet. Every last employee). This is such pathetic lazy writing and has been throughout the series – Lissa knows who is evil because she just DOES and she’s never wrong and then she has the stupidly over the top godlike ability to kill everyone she wants

Worse – not only does she have this incredibly simplistic ability to tell good from evil (because everything is totally that simple guys!) but she’s willing to slaughter literally thousands if not millions of people on that basis of this woo-woo sense. She will literally slaughter them or leave them to die. But it’s ok if thousands of people are dying because Lissa has declared them evil

In fact, let’s go with this brutal tyranny thing because my gods, this is awful. Remember in the last book when she decided to condemn entire species to become slaves because EVIL? It’s confirmed here that there are 70,000 of these people working in slavery and the only complaint is that they’re BAD at what they do (because you’ve taken people used to mega future technology and tried to turn them into 16^thcentury farmers? Maybe? Did no-one recognise why this would be a bad idea? No because aaaaargh!?). Oh and there’s now only 60,000 because there numbers have been whittled down and absolutely no-one gives the slightest fuck about the genocide of 10,000 people through brutal slave labour conditions?! But it’s ok because Lissa has declared them evil!

They eventually decide to round up these 60,000 “trouble making” slaves and dump them on a completely wild planet with no shelter, food or water – and no means or knowledge of how to make any (Lissa doesn’t bother about this because they’ve ”had enough handed to them already”)

Even if you discount the mass slaughter and slavery, I’m not kidding about Lissa micromanaging everything. There’s not even a pretence of democracy or even reasoned decision making. She decides everything on a whim and we get cringeworthy moments like them deciding what the age of consent should be for the comsueli and they completely ignore what the comsueli themselves say – because this entire underclass of servile followers has no rights or say at all under Lissa’s dictatorship.

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The High Demon race is dying, and nothing short of a miracle will save it. Kifirin has promised to provide that miracle, in any way he can.

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Reah has worked in the kitchens of her family's restaurants since the age of eight. The only daughter among Addah Desh's 27 children from eight wives, Reah has been ignored, belittled and abused all her life. When the conscription notice comes from the Regular Alliance Army, Reah is more than happy to report for duty in order to escape her family. Unfortunately, her liberation is short-lived….

Review 

I really liked the heroine in this book and all the details of her being a chef are interesting.

The flat greed of the secondary characters and cruelty was too over simplified for me.

The pace of the book was slow which was fine but it took forever for the romance to come about and then when it turned out to be a cliffhanger, I was done.

Oh dear gods this book is awful. I mean, really awful.

Now I’ve read a lot of awful books lately – usually because they’ve had some social justice fails that are inexcusable like the House of Night series and the Shifters series. So very inexcusable

This is not the case with this book (don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly stellar on that front), this is terrible because it reads like it was written by a 10 year old. It has that level of complexity

This has been the problem with this series for a while now, I’ve complained before about the utter simplicity of the world setting, especially as they’ve expanded too many alien creatures and worlds. I’ve also complained at the utterly simplistic lack of conflict in the conflict with such terribly un-nuanced abilities like being able to “smell” evil (and, of course, the evil being so very very very evil and lacking in nuance or development that you can just kill them). This is the tone of this book. The evil is evil and you just have to kill it (it has no reason to be evil. It’s just evil). It has no subtlety, no difficulty in identification. It’s just evil.

This book takes this whole child-like simplicity and takes it tenfold further.

Firstly there’s Lissa, Supreme Queen of Mary Sues. Oh dear gods she is. And this Sue-ishness is the core of why everything in this book is simple to the point of boring. There are no challenges, none at all. There can’t be. Lissa has super powers, powers that completely eclipse everyone and everything. We open this book with a desperate struggle where the forces of good (and their amazing super powers) are being completely overwhelmed until Lissa arrives and destroys nearly the entire army by herself. There are creatures that are literally destroying entire planets which Lissa completely wipes out in her free time between dinner dates. And the closing scenes of this book involve Lissa pulling off completely unexplained god-like feats with no damn explanation at all. She just ZAP decides the bad guys can no longer have their powers – and lo, entire species across the galaxy are fundamentally changed in terms of magic, physical abilities and lifespan.

Where she gets these powers? I don’t know. And it doesn’t even matter – it’s just a ridiculous over the top tool. Even if you could justify your protagonist having these powers, it’d still be a bad idea because it destroys any kind of tension in the plot. Sure we generally expect the protagonist to win, and the genre is full of protagonists who have awesome powers who we know will win in the end – but when Anita Blakepulls another load of super powers from her vagina, there’s at least an attempt to present the conflict as an actual conflict with the suggestion that Anita COULD lose, that there’s an actual fight

Not in this book. Lissa shows up. The enemy dies. There’s no conflict here. Lissa shows up. Super powers happen. Enemy dies. This isn’t conflict – stepping on an ant has more conflict than this. And it’s boring

Well, of course she’ll have interpersonal conflicts, right? Nope. She is Queen of Sues. Everyone loves her. Everyone. I’m not kidding here. Not one person doesn’t adore her. Half the cast wants to marry her, the other half wants to be her parents or family. They love her. All of them. Unreservedly, without the tiniest shred of criticism or seeing any flaws or issues with her. She is universally adored from the very second when people meet her. And it’s boring. You can’t have a story that looks at character relationships or development when everyone starts as fawning fanboys. She even gets a 21 gun salute from the President even though no-one can publicly explain what she’s actually done. Can you imagine that meeting? “We need a 21 gun salute for this lady with no last name or legal identity for doing stuff I can’t talk about!”

But there’s more gross simplicity: the world building. This is something, again, I’ve complained about before – with Lissa happily jetting about alien worlds and finding them… not even remotely alien. Again, Lissa would find more culture shock and difficulty navigating if she went to modern day China or Argentina or Norway. These alien worlds simply have no alien elements. These alien beings are largely just human with shiny powers

This is compounded this book with time travel which, again, pretty much fails to imagine how Earth would change 300 years in the future. And it shows how little thought has gone into it – Lissa buys a map for crying out loud! Sure it’s an electronic map but the fact it appears on a screen doesn’t change that maps are nearly extinct now! People have “tiny communication devices” like mobile phones – but even a brief look at trends would see our mobile phones have been getting bigger because we expect them to do way way way more things than communicate. It’s just so lazy! It’s just lacking anything resembling imagination or development. Look at the way the world has changed in the last 300 years! It’s mind boggling so little will change

So what about the plot?

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Lissa is back trying to stop the evil vampires and their terrorist minions doing nefarious things for reasons (it would be nice if they actually explained a little of why they’re doing this beyond EVIL AND EVIL SPACE ELVES)

She has her bag of tricks and super powers to stop them – but she has to do that with her leash constantly being pulled by the men in her life. Her fathers, her husbands, they all have plans for her, they all have an agenda and they all have uses for her. Whether she wants it or not

Ok, I’m going to write a lot about the toxic trainwreck that is Lissa’s relationships in this book so I’m going to cover everything else briefly before diving into that cess pool

The writing/plot in general –lazy lazy lazy. We have aliens dropping in for no other reason than to be ridiculously powerful and scatter deux ex plot-solvers in their wake. We have alien worlds that are still less alien than Ohio – seriously, Lissa would have more culture shock travelling to China than she would have going to these worlds. We have a species of proto-vampires which in any other book may have been an interesting way to develop an actual culture and a way for vampires to exist as an independent species – but no, this is a useful slave species who are also useful food. This is about it.

Which applies, pretty much, to Lissa’s powers of well. Super misting that lets her kill everyone. The actual power to smell evil to render any kind of tracking, investigation or questioning or any actual work completely moot. Every encounter is just resolved by throwing super powers at it.

We have the same minimal diversity – another world with almost no female supernaturals because REASONS, gay characters who lurk in the background and POC largely being absent (but we have a sinister Middle-Eastern terrorist)

Now the cess pool. This book continues on the series’ habit of having one of the worst relationships I’ve encountered. And, ye gods, that is saying something considering what I have read

Lissa’s history of abuse actually exacerbates everything because all of her reaction to the terrible way everyone – and especially Gavin – inflicts on her is all blames on her past and being such a delicate fragile female, bless her little dainty heart. Him screaming and breaking things in a raging snit because she dares to not obey him causes her to collapse in terror – and it’s because she’s fragile, not because he’s abusive. And everyone’s supposed to accept that his behaviour isn’t abusive because he won’t hit her – that’s the toxic message of this book; if he doesn’t hit her, it’s not abuse. He can scream and yell. He can swear and rage for hours. He can refuse to listen to her and berate her. He can be a constant reminder of the fact he once imprisoned and threatened to have her killed. But it’s not “abuse” if it’s not violent… apparently (and the constant underlying threat of violence doesn’t count?).

And all of this is doubly clear by how AWARE Lissa is of his disapproval, of his emotions – it’s the hyper-aware reaction of an abuse victim constantly worried about his reaction. She’s constantly worried about how Gavin will react – even when defying him and doing her own thing anyway it’s with full acknowledgement of the fact that Gavin will disapprove and there will be consequences.

This doesn’t just apply to Gavin – just about every relationship she has with the men in this book (and they are ALL men. There are two teeny tiny female roles that barely appear otherwise it’s all men men men) is toxic. In fact, except for one FBI agent and some tiny side characters, they all slot into 3 categories:

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Five years have past after Cayates destroyed the Planet of Siriaa. At least it is five years for everyone else, for Quin it is just a moment. Thrown in time five years later by the mystical Orb she is connected to God knows why, she starts to hunt for the person who destroyed her world. Not knowing what really happened with her loved ones and all the other people from Siriaa, Quin tries to find a person responsible for the tragedy and to find answers for who and what she really is.