\u201cIn the Wake of the Ruined\u201d begins with its heroine crawling out of the sea on all fours, dragging a dead king\u2019s sword and a dead king\u2019s crown, with a hole in her middle packed with kelp and blood-soaked sand. She has kept herself alive by paying a price she does not fully understand yet. That single picture holds the whole book inside it.<\/p>\n
Picking up moments after In the Veins of the Drowning<\/em> closed, In the Wake of the Ruined by Kalie Cassidy<\/strong> follows Imogen Nel, part Siren and part Goddess, newly crowned and freshly corrupted by her bond with the ancient Mage Eusia. Theodore Ariti, God-king of Varya, is sailing in the opposite direction toward a political marriage he has quietly hollowed out from the inside. Imogen stows away on his ship. Nothing about what follows is tidy, and very little of it is safe.<\/p>\n Cassidy spent over a decade as a working theater actor and coach before she wrote fiction, and the training is all over the page. She writes bodies. Not the smooth, camera-ready bodies of a lot of shelf-adjacent romantasy, but bodies that seep, spasm, char, and refuse to cooperate. Magic here is not a light show. It is a transaction. You give flesh, blood, hair, and intention, and you get a result, and then the spell comes back later to collect what it is owed. Imogen\u2019s scalp burns. Her hair falls out in clumps. Her eyes go milk-white. One of the finest ideas in the book is a line lifted from an in-world text: a Mage\u2019s magic and a God\u2019s power are two edges of one perfectly balanced sword. Everything in the plot eventually turns on that sentence.<\/p>\n The nautical imagery never feels decorative. Characters describe each other as rigging, as hulls needing pitch and joiners, as ships taking on water. When Theodore snaps at his chancellor that he is the captain and the man before him is a single line of rope, easily replaced, the metaphor lands because Cassidy has already earned it.<\/p>\n The Imogen and Theodore relationship works because both of them are correct. She is genuinely dangerous to him. He is genuinely reckless in the way he wants her. Neither position is a misunderstanding waiting to be cleared up over one honest conversation, which is the fatal weakness of so many sequels in this genre.<\/p>\n What the romance gets right:<\/p>\n The obstacle is structural, not emotional.<\/strong> Crowns, contracts, and a corrupted bond stand between them, and none of those can be talked away. Lachlan Mela, commander and reluctant co-conspirator, is the most entertaining person in the book and also the most quietly decent. Agatha, Imogen\u2019s former governess, is written with a steel that never tips into caricature. Eftan, the aging chancellor, is a superb villain precisely because he believes his cruelty is love, and the scene where his fate is decided is the best character beat in the novel, full stop.<\/p>\n And then there is Halla, the Obelian princess, who is the most fascinating figure in In the Wake of the Ruined by Kalie Cassidy<\/strong> and, frustratingly, the one we understand least. More on that in a moment.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Wake of the Ruined\u201d is a good book with real problems, and this one has them.<\/p>\n The middle section loops.<\/strong> Imogen resolves to keep away from Theodore. Circumstance throws them together. Tension rises. She flees. Repeat. This cycle runs several times across Part II, and the bowsprit-netting scenes in particular replay near-identical beats. The emotional logic is sound, but the pacing pays for it. None of this sinks \u201cIn the Wake of the Ruined\u201d. All of it is worth naming.<\/p>\n Strip away the sirens and the seawater and this is a story about power, and specifically about the difference between power you are given and power you claw out of your own body<\/a>. The Gods simply have it. The Mages pay for it in flesh. Every antagonist in the book is someone who was made to feel small by a parent, and every one of them decided to fix that by making someone else smaller.<\/p>\n The ship Imogen stows away on is named the Eleuthios, after a Leucosian principle: the right to choose for yourself. Cassidy plants that early and then spends four hundred pages testing it. The payoff is thematic rather than pyrotechnic, and I suspect that will divide readers. It worked on me.<\/p>\n Readers who finished In the Veins of the Drowning<\/em><\/a> and want the emotional bill to come due Skip it if you need tight plotting above all else, or if graphic injury and on-page grief are not what you read for.<\/p>\n Rachel Gillig, One Dark Window<\/em><\/strong> for magic that eats its caster from the inside In the Wake of the Ruined by Kalie Cassidy<\/strong> is a messy, hungry, physically punishing sequel that mostly earns its excesses. It sags in the middle, it leans too often on visions, and it wastes its most interesting character. It also contains a handful of scenes I will be thinking about for a long time, and an ending that quietly refuses the coronation the genre usually promises.<\/p>\n Cassidy is not writing comfort. She is writing appetite, and the wreckage appetite leaves. Read In the Wake of the Ruined by Kalie Cassidy<\/strong> for the ache, and stay for the surprisingly gentle argument buried underneath it: that the person who wins is the one who stops wanting to be worshipped.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIn the Wake of the Ruined\u201d begins with its heroine crawling out of the sea on all fours, dragging a dead king\u2019s sword and a dead king\u2019s crown, with a hole in her middle packed with kelp and blood-soaked sand. She has kept herself alive by paying a price she does not fully understand yet. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A prose style that tastes of salt<\/h3>\n
The romance, and what makes it more than yearning<\/h3>\n
\nConsent is negotiated on the page.<\/strong> A scene in a saltwater grotto is one of the most carefully paced intimate sequences I have read in the genre this year, and the tension comes from restraint rather than transgression.
\nThe banter is actually funny.<\/strong> Theodore\u2019s dry, kingly deadpan against Imogen\u2019s blunt fury produces real comedy, not filler.
\nTheodore is allowed to be compromised.<\/strong> He lies, he threatens, he tells her flatly to stop thinking he is good. That refusal to sand him into a noble love interest is the smartest choice Cassidy makes.<\/p>\nThe supporting cast is the secret engine<\/h3>\n
Where the ship takes on water<\/h3>\n
\nVisions become a delivery service.<\/strong> Imogen\u2019s Mage Seer visions are genuinely unsettling the first two times. By the fifth, they have hardened into a mechanism for handing the reader backstory exactly when the plot needs it.
\nThe magic gets a practice mode.<\/strong> A rat in a rusted cage is used to test a lethal spell, and a key character reveals offhand that she has been secretly rehearsing with mice. This deflates the cost that the book has spent three hundred pages establishing.
\nHalla has no point of view.<\/strong> She undergoes the largest, strangest transformation of anyone in the novel, and we watch it entirely from outside. Two POV chapters from her would have turned a very good book into a great one.
\nMarkis, the steward, is furniture.<\/strong> Drunk, lecherous, cowardly, and useful mainly as a red herring, he never earns his page count.
\nThe council politics are asserted more than dramatized.<\/strong> We are repeatedly told Theodore\u2019s crown is in jeopardy. We rarely feel the machinery grinding.
\nTonal whiplash.<\/strong> The book can move from mutilation to banter to explicit intimacy inside a few pages. Some readers will find that electrifying. Others will find one particular sequence tonally hard to accept given what is lying in the corner of the room.<\/p>\nWhat the book is really about<\/h3>\n
Who should pick this up<\/h3>\n
\nAnyone who likes their fantasy romance with genuine body horror and moral rot underneath the yearning
\nReaders drawn to magic systems with a real, physical cost
\nFans of dual first-person POV done with distinct voices<\/p>\nIf this one lands, read these next<\/h3>\n
\nHannah Whitten, The Foxglove King<\/em><\/strong> for bargains with dying gods and a heroine who pays in blood
\nAva Reid, A Study in Drowning<\/em><\/a><\/strong> for drowned deities and gorgeous, unsettling atmosphere
\nCarissa Broadbent, The Serpent and the Wings of Night<\/em><\/a><\/strong> for a blood bond that is both salvation and threat
\nKerri Maniscalco, Kingdom of the Wicked<\/em><\/strong> for lush, dark romance with a vengeful heroine
\nThea Guanzon, The Hurricane Wars<\/em><\/strong> for enemies bound by duty on opposite sides of a war<\/p>\nThe final word<\/h3>\n