My sister is to blame for me reading this one. 🙂
When she fell down a Dramione fanfiction rabbit hole a while ago, the fic this book is based on was one of her favorites. So I was intrigued and even more so when I learned the author had turned the idea into an original novel. Thanks are also in order to the publisher, because I was lucky enough to be granted an audiobook ARC of this and I really enjoyed the narration.
ROSE IN CHAINS
by Julie Soto
Published: Forever, 8th July 2025
Hardcover: 464 pages
Audiobook: 16 hours
Narrated by: Ella Lynch
Series: The Evermore Trilogy #1
My rating: 6/10
Opening line: Briony thought it was strange that she didn’t feel it when her brother died.
The war is over, the dark forces have won, and the hero who was supposed to save them is dead.
Captured as her castle is overrun by the enemy, Briony Rosewood knows that the world as she knows it is changed forever. The dark forces of Bomard have won and her people, the Eversuns, face imminent servitude, imprisonment or death. Her brother, fated to be heir twice over and unite the warring kingdoms, is dead.
Stripped of her Mind Magic and her freedom, Briony and the other survivors are quickly auctioned off to the highest bidders in an auction – and as the heir-apparent’s sister, she fetches the highest price.
After a fierce bidding war, she’s sold to none other than Toven a high ranking Bomardsun – and her long-time and ill-fated infatuation. Scion of a family known for their cruel control of Heart Magic, the Hearsts are ruthlessly ambitious, and Briony knows they will use her however they can to further their own interests.
Yet despite the horrors of her new world and the role she must learn to play within it, all is not lost. Help – and hope – may yet arise in the most unlikely of places…
My feelings about this book are a bit of a mess. On the one hand, there were elements I enjoyed so much, on the other hand, I have gripes. Quite a few of them.
The story is told in two timelines, although the focus lies on the here and now. Which is the aftermath of a war between two kingdoms. Briony Rosewood, princess of the Eversuns, and lifelong supporter of her brother (the ruler-to-be), is enslaved after her kingdom is attacked by the kingdom of Bomard. She and many other surviving women are then auctioned off to the highest bidder, to be used as slaves – either magically or sexually. Or both. As dark as this set-up sounds as I type it here, it never really felt that way in the book.
I blame the weak characterization and world building.
We don’t get a lot of information on how this world works, although the idea of two competing magic systems – heart magic and mind magic – was intriguing. While the kingdom of Bomard uses heart magic, which is more physically taxing but also powerful, the Eversuns use mind magic, which comes across as a neverending fount of strength. More details aren’t given, but I was fine with that, this being, first and foremost, a romantasy novel. I am quite happy to focus on the romance if that is meant to be the heart of the book.
And the romance… worked in parts. Incidentally, the parts I’m talking about are the flashbacks we get of Briony’s school years. Not only are those the strongest ones when it comes to world building, because we get to actually see some of it, but also because it fleshes out Briony’s character and shows her changing relationship to the Bomard boy Toven Hearst.
Briony is clearly and obviously the smartest and best at school, but due to her brother being the heir and women not being worth all that much in her culture, she uses her knowledge and cleverness to support him instead. And she does so gladly. For the most part. But Tovan is onto her, which I assume is what makes him develop feelings, although this is only implied. It was also in those flashback chapters that we see the two interact. There’s a little banter, there’s a little teasing, and I was here for it!
But cut back to the present and the plot gets slow. Very slow. It runs mostly on the idea of enslaving young women to use them as a magical familiars and/or sex slave that drives the plot. And let’s be honest, if nothing really happens, there’s very little drive. Briony, surprising nobody but the characters in the book, is won at auction by Toven and then granted a rather cushy version of slavehood. This bothered me for several reasons, most of all because it presents the “good slave owner” narrative I find disgusting in every way. Secondly, it is so obvious that Tovan genuinely likes her and was trying to save her from a terrible fate to the best of his abilities, within the structure of the society he lives in. But their interactions in the present, when they happen at all, are so. Damn. Boring.
It doesn’t help that literally all side characters are cardboard cutouts without any personality. The bad guys are ridiculously bad. We learn about some other women’s lives and the terrible things they go through but the way these scenes were written kept them at a distance. Again, I get that a romance novel will focus on the two main characters and their, well, romance, but you can’t set up a society with magical slavery and then just brush it aside. Or when you do show the horrors of it all, do so through characters I never got the chance to care about.
The other thing that annoyed me was that – because of the slow middle part – this book could have been a lot shorter. It came across like the publishers (or author?) wanted it to be drawn out, just so they could turn this into a trilogy, rather than a standalone novel. Because once I’ve reached the end, nothing has been resolved, not all that much has happened in the grand scheme of things, and we’ve learned very little about what the future might hold.
There is one piece of information that will make readers ask “so what happens next” but we could have been given that information after a third of the book and then just gone on the actual adventure.
So what did I like about this, then? The audiobook narration by Ella Lynch was lovely, although I’ve read some reviews where people bounce off her voice hard. So maybe listen to a sample, before you decide to go that route. Different tastes and all that. 🙂
I also loved the flashback chapters where we get to see the characters at school, see Briony and her brother Rory interact, Tovan and his crew be mean, and where the tensions between the two kingdoms felt tangible.
I also enjoyed the parts where help arrives from unexpected quarters, when people come together to fight evil, and of course the (sadly very few) moments of sexual tension between Briony and Toven. Honestly, I was a bit surprised at how little these two talk, but that just brings us back to this being just the opening part of a trilogy.
I will read the next book, because this one didn’t really deliver what I was hoping for. There was not nearly enough romance for a romantasy, and the plot has barely kicked off at this point. Which kind of sucks, but also gives me hope that the next volume will get things going for real. All of this sounds quite negative, I realize, but the book wasn’t bad. I think a (chunky) standalone with a stronger focus on character development and especially the relationship between the two romantic leads would have worked better, but I still enjoyed myself to some degree during the entire listening experience.
I was hoping this would be my newest romantasy crush. It sadly didn’t turn out that way, but there was still enough here to make me keep going and see what the story is really all about. Now it’s time to play the waiting game.
MY RATING: 6/10 – Good
