Reviewed by Ashavan
TITLE: The Bastard’s Pearl
AUTHOR: Connie Bailey
PUBLISHER: DSP Publications
LENGTH: 324 pages
BLURB:
When Sheyn, a headstrong young aristocrat, disobeys his parents and travels to the far east, he passes through Kandaar, an isolated country of strange customs. He is abducted, transformed by a mysterious ritual, and sold to a barbarian king as a pleasure slave. When the king is killed by Kashyan the Bastard, dispossessed prince of Clan Savaan, Sheyn becomes Kashyan’s possession.
The Bastard expects Sheyn—now called Pearl—to behave as an obedient pleasure slave, but compliance is not in Sheyn’s nature. Nor does Sheyn’s ordeal stop at being held captive by people he considers savages. The Red Temple covets Sheyn as a living gateway to the demon realm and plans to use him to summon the God of Death.
Kashyan loathes Sheyn, and Sheyn despises Kashyan, but when the Red Temple kidnaps Sheyn, honor compels Kashyan to rescue his slave, and he starts a war in the process. If they hope to stop the Red Monks from bringing hell to earth, Sheyn will have to accept Kashyan is more than an uncivilized brute, and Kashyan will have to admit there’s more to his Pearl than a pretty, arrogant exterior.
REVIEW:
I struggled with this book.
The main character is an arrogant ass. There’s a tremendous amount of time and effort given to the transformation of this character into someone the reader would root for. It’s a beautiful effort, but it starts in the middle of the book, and so for the first several chapters, too many chapters, I was stuck with this character who was perfect and given everything, and he was an arrogant ass. There’s a purpose to that, and not even a bad one, but it made the early part of the story difficult to get through.
Part of my struggle in the early chapters was an unnecessary, and for me too graphic, history and threat of sexual violence. It felt constant and overt and uncomfortable. Also, because that history comes up so early in the story, it made it difficult to see Sheyn for who he was. All we got was arrogant veneer and this history that makes him so painfully frightened — and puts him in that fright before we can really empathize with the character. I’ll be frank, I’m a survivor of sexual violence, and I almost put down the book as too much.
I did pull through those difficult early chapters, and once I did the story started to really hit a stride. Sheyn doesn’t get immediately likeable. What changes is the introduction of a cast of characters including the Bastard Prince, the elder prince who is more seasoned and reasonable, and Velvet, a pleasure slave trained from childhood. The interplay between these characters becomes a joy to read, and because Sheyn is new to this land, he’s getting the world building parts in different ways from different characters in a way that stretches it out and keeps it from getting ponderous in the way that is so dangerous for fantasy.
The pleasure slave mythology is an interesting one, and I think the interplay between Sheyn and Velvet in particular help keep the story moving. Of all the characters who are justifiably making Sheyn angry, Velvet is the one who helps ground him by being in the same situation and handling it completely differently. The mystic rite that made Sheyn into a pleasure slave has also made him unexpectedly powerful, and that’s always such a difficult line to draw, because challenges for powerful characters can be so hard to do well. And yet the characters do sacrifice, and they do get injured and the injuries have lasting effects. That balance is really hard to do well, as it can make challenges feel artificial. Sheyn’s power is always offset though, offset by terror at times, and by sacrifice, and by being so new that it doesn’t work as he expects.
Overall, I enjoyed this story, but wish that it had come with trigger warnings for torture (sometimes explicit) and sexual violence (ditto). While I struggled with the depictions of both, I can say that I would read another story in this world if the author were to write one. While her main characters didn’t engage me in all the ways I might hope, the world building and secondary characters kept this an enjoyable read until I actually wanted to care for Sheyn. And given how much I disliked him at the start, that’s an accomplishment.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: