#ShadowintheEmpireofLight #NetGalley
A good solid read for mystery and fantasy readers. I think readers will enjoy the characters.

What an odd little book. I could have lived with the thin thin plot and ridiculous naming scheme, but I draw the line at extremely graphic, seemingly pointless cousin porn.

Let me start by saying, this book is for someone, though that person isn't me. I felt like the premise was fun and will be appealing to some, but it didn't deliver like I thought it would. I enjoyed the names of the characters and the way society is structured through matriarchal lines. There's a lot of free love in this book, which is fun, but possibly too risqué for me.

The entire narrative takes place over a few days at a country estate with a LOT of kissing cousins, in the literal sense. I understand that this world is meant to follow laws that are not like those of the world we inhabit in real life, but there are some things that are too far for the imagination to reach. This is one of them. I think at one point Shine is being propositioned by her first cousin and there's a nod to incest being gross at some point? It's just a bit out there for me. That might be me reading the lineage chart incorrectly or possibly an editing slip, but it didn't make sense there.

It reminds me a little of the Wicked novels, with fantastical names and interesting world building, but with a lot of sexual content thrown in. It's a little bit unsettling for me, but again, that's just me. This book has an audience out there.

There's a lot of talk about mating and some suggested rape. Lots of drug use, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I think it's written well and it would be good for some audience. It could also, probably do with a trigger warning. Overall, it's an interesting book, but probably not one I'd pick up again.

I received a galley copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review from Netgalley.

I nearly DNF'd this several times. To be perfectly honest, the world building was lacking up front, and the social interaction was confusing. There wasn't enough background to understand what was expected as a reader, and what I should seem to already know about this world. By 38%, nothing had really happened and what did, didn't make sense. And, for a book that's supposed to be YA, there's a lot of questionable sexual themes. I'm all for realistic situations but my god that's a lot of unnecessary sex, rape, incest and group sex. To be honest, I got a little lost in the family relationships and dynamics, so they may call themselves cousin, but even non blood cousins make me squeamish. I really think this is a case of the "less is more" theory- any psychological impact was negated by the sheer quantity of it. I think the author was trying to make a bold statement about social mores, and contrast with the "Ghosts" but even the descriptions were a little thematically icky. The pale sickly technological people versus the tanned, beautiful magical? The idea of trying to force the color/race issue felt just like that- forced. Trying to make an us versus them mentality for the characters can be done in better ways, with more subtly and interest for the reader.
The tag line for this book was so promising- murder, spies, telepathic cats, mayhem! We got the watered down version and it took nearly the whole book to get there.

Interesting, kinda, at least enough to keep me going to see how it ended. Not really my style though, as the feminist talk bored me, and found the telepathic cat a little odd. If I was in my 20s instead of my 50s I might have liked it a bit more. Would recommend if you want a quick easy summer read.

An interesting read. It always exciting to see someones elses take on magic! Loved the whole matriarchal society! Can't wait to see where the series goes.

Thank you, Rebellion and Netgalley, for accepting my request to read this ARC.

Shadow in the Empire of Light is a promising feminist fantasy story about mystery, family drama and playful magic. Through my perspective, the summary talks about family dynamics, supernatural creatures and a rich cultural setting. That's why I immediately requested this when I saw it. I was in the mood for some good magic and intrigue!

The story evolves around Shine, an orphan without magic in a family full of it. She lives with her eccentric aunt and telepathic cat. Their extended family arrives for the annual Fertility Festival and Shine is thrown into a mystery mixed with spies and playful magic. She has to choose where her loyalties lie and what she wants to achieve in the future. On top of that she also meets Shadow, an Outlander from the Ghostlands, who will bring even more complexity to her journey. Reading the summary I was met with a creative take on the fantasy genre, taking playful magic and mixing it with mystery and questions of loyalty. The promise of feminism and sex positivity also meant a great deal to me. This is something I will never get bored of in literature and I can only applaud authors for attempting it.

But finishing this book, I was met with conflicting feelings. The author claims to "write strong women" in her biography but I'm sorry to say that I didn't see them in this book. The majority of characters are disrespectful and unsympathetic, lacking development. Shine, the main character, is the sort of person that ignores people when they explain they're uncomfortable with how she behaves. She continues to behave like this for her own gain. Scenes in this book are regularly given a distasteful vibe because of this. It also didn't help her case that this book is written in first person. I can't relate to a character that, for example, spies on a man washing himself, especially when he clearly states he doesn't want that. Women throughout history have fought against being treated like this so in my opinion we don't need scenes where the roles are reversed. Sex positivity is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but I find it infuriating when people force it upon others who don't want to talk about it.

And Shine's character does improve a little at about 70% in the book. But her change of heart is never explored. There's no inner dialogue about what she thinks about her past behavior. Because of this, I found it hard to root for her. Her dynamic with Shadow regularly results into her racist thought process, talking about his skin and grammar. For me, this doesn't build up a good character unless they're met with consequences or relatable dialogue with others. And this never happens. I can understand Shine's character has grown through her heritage and upbringing but I can't encourage characters who are not being explored in a thoughtful manner.

I think I understand what the author meant to do here. In some way, the first chapters give the promise of a world based on discrimination, racial judgment and characters who will be confronted with their behavior, resulting in deep development. The book would achieve this if it included criticism or consequences within scenes. In this way, the promised complexity and intrigue of this book is regularly diminished by its characters and the way dialogues are handled.

The idea for this book is 100% there but the execution is at 30%. Reading this and seeing its potential in family dynamics and world building, I think this book would be better executed as a (high) fantasy tome. World building remains flat by a lack of setting and the culture is ignored throughout shallow dialogues about "pricks" and "sickly paleness of one's skin". The story attempts to take on too much focus on both characters, magic systems and culture. A good example for me is the character of Kitti, Shine's telepathic cat. This supernatural creature intrigued me from the beginning but I found myself hungry for more backstory. Kitti, at the end, has no real purpose towards the story and I wonder why she was created.

If characters would be given more relatability through inner conflict, this might've been a good character driven story. The complexity of the world remains ignored by an overwhelming amount of characters without connection to the story, which resulted in me forgetting who was who. Reading this, I felt like I was given a draft for a promising story. It's something I would 100% enjoy more if the story had been fleshed out. I feel like this book is also a build up to a sequel. If this ever releases, I would be interested to read it. I think the quality and premise of the sequel will influence my opinion on this book.

I was disappointed this book didn't offer trigger warnings for, as an example, incest.

Let’s start by saying I was immensely disappointed by this book. The plot sounded so cool. When I started reading this book, I was immediately confused. I didn’t understand anything at all about what was going on. Everything was just dropped there. It stayed that way for a few chapters, before I began to understand something. But even after that there was a lot that I didn’t understand. There was a lot going on, but nothing really happened. There were a lot of names thrown at you. And even with the family tree in front of the book I had no idea who everyone was, because everyone had like 3 names/nicknames.

The world that Jane Routley build was quite interesting, actually. But there was so muh more potential in this world. Also, the story is very strong, but weakly elaborated. You could have made so much more out of a girl who doesn’t fit in her own family. In this way, I didn’t realy care much about the main character, I didn’t care about what would happen to her and couldn’t find some sympathy for her.

Then about the writing style: overall, the writing style was good. But there were some things that could bother some people. Like the sex scenes. It didn’t bother me, but I can understand it if it would bother you. After all, the book was taking place during a Fertillity Festival, so there was obviously going to be sex. What I didn’t like was the way they tought about sex. At one point Shine was pretending to have seks with her cousin, like WHAT? Why would you do that, and why does anyone care? They also didn’t really care about Shadow, who was clearly uncomfortable with talking about sex, but they kept talking about his ‘prick’. That’s just rude.

Overall, it was a very disappointing read. I don’t know if there is going to be a sequel, but I don’t really care about Shine enough to think I will read it.

Thankyou to Rebellion Pubishing and NetGalley for providing me this ARC

This book has a unique set up and I really enjoyed Shine and the way she struggled between her own dreams and her family. I was a bit disappointed by the plot of the story though, it was set up to be this adventure plot of Shadow going to find Shine's mother, but at half way through the book we still haven't left the estate. I also found during my reading that there were many spelling errors or issues with the grammar that pulled me out of the story. In all I think the idea of the book was great but the execution wasn't to my taste.

Spoilers/Trigger Warning
The book was an interesting read as it was set in a magical world where female mages were in power. The plot, while open-ended, was still interesting as you read through family dynamics and the magical politics surrounding the family. However, the book' used themes of rape, incest, and racism without any trigger warning, and it didn't feel necessary to involve those themes as casually as it did at all. The book, with an interesting premise, rushed through serious topics and made it seem overall cheap.

A fun YA fantasy which paints an interesting, magical world and has a terrific protagonist, and then bog sthe whole thing down somewhat by eventually being a bit of a family mystery story. Our lead, Bright, is a mundane magic free daughter of the ruling magical family, and the power structure that exists in a world with very powerful magic users underpin the story. There is a hierarchy where light skinned people (who are foreign) are shunned - and the book is interesting about shade policing, but also I think once the racism issue is raised, the casual use of the slur for white people (ghost) goes somewhat examined in a - cheers for race swopping but not considering the context way. I rather enjoyed not having any idea where it was going, and it feels like with missing parents and missing kids and an entire map of political intrigue to explore that more or less staying in the house was a mistake (I assume these are threads for further books - though that doesn't seem that clear). Oh and did I mention the telepathic cat.

That said for a feminist and sex positive book with interesting themes it never bored me, and in places surprised me with where it was willing to go (there is some quite horrific abuse stuff near the end). Not really my bag, but for the right audience (people who like cats) this will be catnip.

It's a fairly standard 'unmagical member of a magical family' story. Shadow, a pale skinned man from the patriarchal northerly of two adjacent empires, is stranded in the southerly, dark skinned southern empire, which is a matriarchal society where the women are more powerful mages than the men. Shine, the talentless daughter of a powerful family, gives Shadow refuge during an annual ceremony which sees all the rest of the family descend upon their country seat which she runs almost as an unpaid servant. She is looked down upon, also, because her father was a light skinned northener and her mother is long disappeared and thought to be dead.

But it is well done and I look forward to reading the sequel as in many ways this book just sets things up for future stories.

But drop the telepathic cat, she adds nothing to the story.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve DNF’d after six chapters. It’s not going anywhere and it’s mostly talk about sex and baby making. But keeping it in the family - not my idea of a good read. The so called fantasy reads like it’s aimed at a very young audience which makes the sex talk seem out of place. I’m grateful to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read an e-ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Shine Lucheyart may be a granddaughter of the ruling Empress, but as a magic-less mundane with a vanished (some say dead) mother and a pale-skinned foreign father, she's forced to live a quiet life of genteel poverty on an isolated country estate, with little company aside from a giant talking cat and her radical, semi-banished aunt. But when her extended family descends on her home for an annual fertility festival---and a pale-skinned scholar from a neighboring republic who's not supposed to be in the country at all gets dumped in her lap---she finds herself caught up in plots and schemes that threaten everything she holds dear.

Overall I enjoyed this a lot, and I think anyone who likes their fantasy steeped in politics and family drama would do the same. Shine is a character very much caught between: though clever and generally well-intentioned (though in many ways still very much the product of her upbringing), and the beneficiary of a society where her sex and lineage give her special status, her lack of magic keeps her very much at the dregs of her social class, a poor relation who will struggle to ever escape that fate. (Mundane members of mage families get treated a bit like illegitimate children, in that they can't inherit and they can't exercise political power.) Her pale (well . . . paler) skin sets her apart from her peers, a constant reminder of her lack of fully belonging.

I think I'd need to read the next book (this is clearly set up for more books) before commenting further on the racial and social elements at play here. The Empire is a matriarchal, matrilineal society where women hold most of the power, but . . . a feminist utopia, this is not. And the as-yet-unseen neighboring republic, glimpsed through comments by Shadow (the pale-skinned foreigner who finds himself quite literally hiding under Shine's bed . . . don't ask, just read the book!), seems to be a counterpoint in many ways, but without seeing it firsthand, it's hard to really give an analysis. It didn't escape my notice that the dark-skinned empire has an economy based on resource extraction, while the pale-skinned republic seems to have a more capitalist manufacturing-based economy---along with a patriarchal, patrilineal social structure---and I'm curious to see where the author goes there.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

This was not what I expected at all. Sadly this book did not work for me. There was too much incest and not enough of a good story building. There were also various storylines involving rape and I wish there was a trigger warning. This book just did not sit well with me and I couldn’t find any of the characters besides the telepathic cat likable.

First and foremost, I would like to thank NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. When I first read the blurb of this story, I was drawn to the general idea of it. However, just a chapter into this story, I was already threading through the fragile glass. To start things off, it’s not a perfect fantasy/magic themed story, nor is it completely bad. Shadow in the Empire of Light personally has way too many things going on around Shine, the protagonist in the story and yet it really lacked a lot with world-building.

One of my peeves in fantasy is the vagueness when stepping into the world the author created. I felt like since the first chapter, I dive headfirst into the story and was barely keeping my head above the water. It didn’t help much that there wasn’t much information to go by with the premise of Shine’s world in general. I supposed finding that balance with too much info-dumping and too little plays a huge part for me to enjoy any new fantasy novels. I tried giving this book a chance, to at least read a hundred pages, but I couldn’t really get into it.

The characters were just dull and most were a bit too snobbish. Shine’s own personality isn’t likable for me. I honestly just don’t know what to make of Shine. The way she treated Shadow throughout the first half is just ordering him around like a servant, and I had been irked when Bright and she pertained to Shadow as if he were less than a person. I mean seriously? He was hidden in a trunk before meeting Shine, and Bright addresses him like a weird alien species. I had hoped that Shine would be that character that would be resourceful and help Shadow back home, but ultimately the minute Shadow was in her room, he just became a servant.

Another thing that needed work, in general, was how magic was incorporated into the book. So the story mainly focused on the Fertility Festival, Shine’s family were important figures within the empire, but the way the clan just entered into the story was just a huge dump of names, without anything concrete to make them memorable. In fact, I’m sorry, but most of them didn’t stick to my head and I’d all but forgotten their importance in the story fast. The magic here felt more like an accessory rather than an integral part of the plot.

In fact, it made magic feel useless in the entirety of the first half. Shine’s family basically just use magic to float around, or fly, or make other things fly, or for other recreational uses. That itself made me push to DNF the book along the halfway mark. I wanted to at least see where the story was headed, but there was just too much going on, and too many loose ends. Ironically out of all the characters, I found Shadow more interesting rather than Shine. I felt that the book really fell short when it came to plot. I just stopped reading when the story was falling flat for me. I’m all for some mature content, or sex scenes if it fits the necessities in the book, but it just wasn’t working for me no matter how hard I tried to soldier through the pages. I think one thing that should’ve been more appreciated is that there were content warnings before readers jump into the novel.

I actually picked this book up because it sounded so promising, and I hoped it would be really deep into magic since we have a telepathic cat, but world-building and intricacies with magic systems are very important to me as a reader, and in this book…it just fell short.

This isn't at all a bad book, but it does have flaws. It could be tighter, could be tidier, and could be clearer. The worldbuilding, while not straight out of a well-used cookie cutter, is not extensive; the viewpoint character, while she isn't completely passive, gets rescued quite a bit, and doesn't seem to achieve all that much. The plot has a lot of threads, but they don't form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are gestures at romance for the main character, but the gestures go in several different directions and never amount to much in the long term (though there is one explicit scene).

It also features one of my pet peeves, which is biblical names in a setting in which Christianity is decidedly not present; it always suggests to me that the author has not thought things through.

In terms of the story: Shine, the main character, is part of a large family all with names that have to do with light in some way (though some of them have add-ons, like Blazeann or Sparklea, most are along the lines of Radiance or Gleam). They're a cadet branch of the imperial family in a nation that I at first thought was based on ancient China, because of its tendency to self-isolate and refer to pale-skinned foreigners as "ghosts". As the book progressed, though, it became clear that if China was an influence, it was only one influence, and a good bit of the setup was out of the author's head (which I approve of; taking an entire fantasy society from a superficial impression of a real historical society always seems lazy to me).

The family are, on the whole, pretty nasty, with a few exceptions, and even the exceptions are still mostly entitled aristocrats with a tendency to indulge themselves in drug-taking and sex. You become an aristocrat by being a mage, and mages, rather than using their powers for useful things like building bridges or clearing agricultural land, apparently leave all of that to the peasants to do by hand, and mainly use their (primarily psychokinetic) powers recreationally.

Shine's aunt, who raised her, is, at least, a radical thinker who thinks the peasants should be, you know, paid for their work rather than made to work on the nobles' land as a form of taxation, and educated, and so forth. But she and Shine are "mundanes," non-mages, who are therefore only gentry, not nobility, and have little status in the family (though considerably more than the peasants outside it, which Shine is at least uncomfortable about).

Multiple and mostly non-intersecting plots are under way in and around the family, as they come to the country estate that Shine and her aunt manage for an annual fertility ceremony. Shine gets involved in all of the plots one way or another, but isn't especially effectual. At one point, she finds out (through Convenient Eavesdrop, which is a plot device I hate) that two family members are planning to sabotage the matriarch's drug stash so that she's incapacitated and loses face; she attempts to foil the plot, but <spoiler>someone else is already on top of it, and her intervention is unnecessary</spoiler>. Later, while she does take effective action once against an enemy, she and her companions keep getting into dire straits and then getting cavalry-rescued unexpectedly (this happens three times in quick succession). Eventually, all of the plot lines wrap up, mostly not very conclusively, with minimal help from Shine, and in a way that reveals they were never all that connected in the first place.

I made a note partway through that I didn't feel like the author had the chops to achieve a really satisfactory ending, and reflecting on the ending, I think I was right. Overall, the book feels undercooked. The middle does plenty of development of lots of different things, but they never come together, and the main character is caught up in events more than she drives them. The worldbuilding is underwhelming, and yet I found myself confused more than once about how things worked.

I have to say that I picked up the book in large part because it had a telepathic cat in it, and I've been a sucker for telepathic cats ever since I read Andre Norton's Forerunner books at the age of about 11 or 12. The telepathic cat could have been more utilized, but overall, she was a good one, even if her name (Katti) was distinctly unimaginative.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

Another person who DNF’d early on. I was drawn in by the premise, but found it hard to get into and be interested in. The writing was a bit too wordy for me as well, which made it feel more difficult to follow along with what was or was not happening in the story.

DNF @ 15%. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get into this book. The protagonist frustrated me with her naïveté, and I overall wasn’t a fan of the writing style. I’m also sort of just tired of fantasy that relies on bad aspects of society as a backbone for plot. Even if these things clearly aren’t supported by the author or the protagonist, I wish more authors recognized it was possible to build a fantasy society without relying on things such as homophobia and women being suitable for bearing children and little else.

I felt like there was so much going on with this book, but at the same time, nothing was really happening. I got to around 40% and nothing big really happened to make it exciting. I was drawn into this book because the synopsis says telepathic cat and spy and drama, but I really didn’t see like any of it. The cat was a cool idea, but literally nothing happened with it like it ran away for a good amount of the beginning.

I’m all for being sexually free and all, but I feel like the way the people in this book handle it are just... idk it was a lot. Like clearly, Shadow was incredibly uncomfortable and yet not much was done to accommodate him in terms of talking about his “prick”. And also, there was a scene where Shine pretends to have sex with her cousin??? Um, idk but what. Why would the people in the house (literally all of them were like relatives) be okay with that?? I’m pretty sure that’s called incest. I DNF’ed at 50% because I felt like the whole plot was just dragging.