Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: The End of All Stories
SERIES: Legends of Badal’Shari #1
AUTHOR: Julia Rosenthal
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three Press
LENGTH: 274 pages
RELEASE DATE: June 27, 2018
BLURB:
On a quest for truths that his books can’t provide, Vael leaves the golden spires of his safe home to travel north, to the territories of the tribes there. But he gets far more than he bargains for when he is bound to Kayan, a chieftan’s son, in a mating ritual performed by a mysterious priestess.
According to her, it is their destiny to save all of Badal’Shari from a terrible cataclysm. And though Vael has serious doubts about fate, and even more doubts about Kayan, he agrees to embark on a so-called journey to save their world…
REVIEW:
For reasons that will soon be abundantly clear, I’m not going to go into depth about the plot of this book. Not really because of spoilers, but because I think that the subtext in a lot of this story overtakes any of the good the plot had. But I do however want you to have a little context for the information given in the below review.
So..this book is a fantasy story set on an island kingdom. Vael, one of the protagonists, is a scholar who wants more than anything to find the truth behind the legends that make up the bones of his society. His insistence at questioning the validity of the Truths, though, gets him thrown out of the Academy. He then decides to undergo a journey to find out the truths for himself. It is during this journey that he comes across one of the out-cast tribes. Where he is forced to bond with Kayan, the son of chieftain, and is then told that the two of them must find a way to save their world from a cataclysmic disaster.
I want to point out, again, that this is a fantasy story. It is 100% fictional. The author had complete control over every aspect, and so every action, reaction, situation, and the societal morals and ideals, were totally up to them. If, say, a certain character is a result of his societies patriarchal misogynistic mores, then he certainly has reasons for acting like he does. However I would like to point out that if the author did not want him to be a misogynistic abusive asshole…they could have quite easily changed either the character or the society he was born in to. Or, if they wanted to use the society and the asshole as a way to highlight certain aspects of the world that were darker and not healthy, they could have easily done that as well. They would of course not then write in characters who handwave away all the problematic areas of the story as Not A Problem. Because that would undercut everything they were trying to say about the society…and would then create a newer, huger, problem.
Like one where it looks like the author is promoting the idea that abuse is romantic.
I’m not going to sugarcoat this, this book’s “romance” is basically a dude falling in love with his abuser. Kayan is physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive towards Vael. And Vael, along with the readers, is told that it shouldn’t matter because Kayan has had a bit of a rough life. He’s just had a bad day, see, so Vael should have known not to speak back to him. So it is really his own fault that he got smacked down–literally. Kayan abusive nature is repeatedly waved off, and with one piss poor “apology” at the end of the book, everything turns out ok. Because Kayan apparently “fell in love” at first sight with Vael–he just didn’t want to accept it. So all those times he demeaned Vael, that was really a smoke screen. And all those time he hit Vael, well that was him fighting with himself, really. And that one time Kayan told Vael that he should be grateful that Kayan hadn’t raped him…yet–well that shows how moral Kayan really is. He wouldn’t rape his husband, so he is clearly a good guy.
Not like Kayan father, Hadrif. Who abducted and raped the woman he called his “wife” for years before the woman lost all hope that anything would change and that her own daughter would be stuck in the same exact situation in a couple years…and so went into the desert and killed herself.
Oh…wait. Hadrif was totally portrayed as a good guy too.
Gee. One has to wonder what a guy has to do to be considered bad in this book.
I don’t know if I should even go into the fact that book went with the “civilized whites” vs the “savage blacks” trope. Which was at best incredibly lazy storytelling. There were some parts of the story that attempted to mitigate the pure disaster that it could have been…but I can’t get away from the fact that this story had at its core an origin story that basically had white gods kidnapping a group of dark-skinned humans and using them as breeding stock to help save the gods’ race. And no one had any problems with it. I don’t know, but would it have been too hard to put one sentence in saying “..and the humans totally agreed to this and were happy to help out”? It would have made it at least a little less fucked up.
I really don’t know what else to say about this book. Yes there were good things about it. I thought the twist at the end–while a bit over-telegraphed–was interesting. And there was some interesting ideas with the cultures presented.
But I 100% stopped giving a fuck about any of it the first time Kayan hit Vael. And I’m not going to apologize for that. This book is being sold as a “Romance” and there is nothing romantic about abusive relationships. I can’t in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. Ever. It was not badly written, and it had a few good points, but my god, it is 2018 and I thought the romance community had at least moved on from this fucked up idea that all a person needed to do was love their abuser a little more and then maybe they will stop fucking beating them and everyone will live Happily Ever After…or at least until the next time the abuser has “a bad day.”
RATING: 
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