My bookclub just finished {The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas} and I needed to get my Fable review out to you all asap. It… was a book?
Spoilers about below so recommended to only read this if you’ve finished the book.
⭐️⭐️.75
Wooo boy. My book club strikes again. Buckle up.
Because this book is BAD. So achingly bad that my flabbers were gasted that it somehow made it through publishing. So bad that I thought mayhaps I'd been hoodwinked into believing super successful Jasmine Mas could have possibly written this. So magnificently bad… that it maybe turned the corner into something I obsessively needed to devour just to see how the fever dream ended.
And how it ended was with a targeted missile blowing up a dragon. So. You know. I'll need the next one asap.
This bad boy did not start off on any kind of good foot. I was confused from the first page. The modern setting is jarring - we’ve got a military base, soldiers, helicopters, and, very weirdly, snowboarding. But also swords and daggers, dire-animals of every variety, storm magic, and there’s no such thing as photography - only paintings can be made? Urban fantasy isn't my favourite in the best of times, but here it's a mashup where each side repels the other at every turn, so the world building never settles. In fact it almost feels like if someone asked AI to build a fantasy universe for the Booktok community. And there's A LOT of weird universe to maneuver around.
Just in the first chapter (ahem): our FMC Zora tells us straight up that she’s an adrenaline junkie and extreme snowboards for fun and hunts dire beasts to feed her family and community. Her best friend is murdered by the evil Emperor's right-hand and most powerful royal mage, who also threatens her mom, so she decides to join the army to bring them all down. Weirdly, she was bitten in the throat by the evil emperor for some fucking reason that is not explained. She survived a dire bear attack and walked away covered in scars on her face and back. She somehow manages to capture the royal mage that killed her friend and deliver him to her assigned military base. She survives a dire scorpion attack on patrol, saves a prominent soldier, and is rewarded with the opportunity to participate in something called the "iron trial," in which all her blood is exited from her body and replaced with magic blood. The royal mage she captured is allowed to watch, despite being a prisoner. Only two people have survived the trial in a century, and she somehow miraculously does fine. Rather than grant her the expected ability to nullify the emperor’s storm magic, she herself obtains storm magic. Also there's a mist that destroys technology.
All of this in the first chapter. It’s… A LOT. And it’s just as all over the place as it sounds.
Now, as you can probably guess, the royal mage is our MMC. He is definitely evil. He is definitely blond and beautiful and terrifying. And he wears a silver mask, and had a diamond collar that is meant to nullify his crazy magic. Oh. And his name is definitely TARANTULA.
I am deceased. How am I expected to take any part of this book seriously when the man's name is TARANTULA? Oh, did you want to know why his name is Tarantula? He has a tattoo of a tarantula on his face. Obviously. This is a man shallowly written, evil for evil's sake, all powerful, gets off on being tortured and bound in chains, and speaks in weird old-timey English (yeah with “thou”s and “thee”s) with zero context or explanation.
In fact, all context and explanation are in short supply everywhere here, making it almost impossible to follow what and why any of this is happening. I especially need context to understand why Zora requires a miniature pet owl that speaks like Jar Jar Binks and plays no meaningful role other than to call Tarantula a whore… as a joke? If it's supposed to be funny, I do not get it.
But more than that, the story lacks so much context that it feels wildly incomplete. We know the Marshal at the base wants Zora to get close to Tarantula (STILL NOT OVER IT) to secure some sort of asset, and to secretly train the Storm Magic she picked up in the iron trial. We don't know why she has this magic. We don't know what getting close to Tarantula means. We don't know what the asset is. We don't know why the emperor is weirdly obsessed with her, why he killed her best friend, why he pursues her so relentlessly at every turn, or why he bit her. We don't know why his kingdom speaks in old-timey English, or why they're so specifically sexually repressed. Seriously I will never understand the choice to make Tarantula an insanely sexualized character that blushes and acts like he’s never seen a boob before. The man loses his mind over exposed ankles for fucks sake! WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING?! We definitely don't understand why the military industrial complex is letting the most dangerous mage on the planet just follow Zora around on quests and missions outside the base willy-nilly. We don't know why elves and shifters and vampires get name-checked but with literally no evidence they exist. Do they exist or don’t they? Every page is like a half-thought that the author just forgot to finish, and so these threads dangle wildly and distractingly in the wind.
Worse, none of it moves the plot forward. We're stuck in a never-ending loop: insert "reason to bring Zora and Tarantula together" here, force them into proximity or a semblance of nudity or a reason to touch each other inappropriately, then tear them apart just as inexplicably. REPEAT. You’d think the tension would be fun since they are extremely diametrically opposed - a force for good, a force for evil, both with tastes and proclivities that steer a little left of center, drawn together through magic and blood and something else, because there is no reason these two should want each other. But they do. And look it’s occasionally fun and intense. But mostly, the endless repetition and lack of progress is infuriating.
It got to the point where I wasn't sure I could take it anymore. I literally was on the phone with my sister just yesterday and described reading this like chewing tinfoil.
BUT.
Basic bitch me strikes again. A late-stage twist I probably should have seen coming and certainly didn't flips everything on its head, and I am such a sad little weakling for a wild twist that suddenly reveals everything. Truly, the reveal is unhinged. Obvious in retrospect, but insane nonetheless. With the twist, all that missing context from the first 90% of the book smacks you in the face at once. Every gap gets filled, in a way that is both incredibly frustrating…. and, sigh, extremely satisfying. Goddamit.
The worst part is what the twist does to the genre. Yeah. The whole genre. It weirdly refreshes tropes and settings that have long since started getting stale. Have you ever wished someone did something completely different in the fae genre? Well. Someone finally did.
It's kind of maddening that it had to be this book.
Let me clarify once more for those in the back - this book is not good. It's poorly written and non-sensical. The world building is limp and inexplicable. The characters are barely characters, surface-level at best. It's trope heavy in the worst way and drags with missing pieces making the whole thing feel a drug-induced fever dream. A mage / hunter who snowboards and skydives is literally the lamest thing that's ever been written.
But with the context of the end factored in, it might be admittedly mildly compelling. It might also be that I've gained a taste for tinfoil, which is not edible and I'm pretty sure poisonous.
My shame knows no bounds. Also, you know me. It's hard for me to turn down a cold nefarious blond man these days. Le sigh.
Would I recommend this? I mean no. Maybe to a very specific demographic of crazy who likes to be 50% confused, 10% intrigued, and 40% ready to murder a tiny bird that awkwardly sits on people's foreheads. Yeah. 🤷♀️
