Seducing the Sorcerer

Seducing the Sorcerer
Lee Welch, 2021

Premise: Fenn isn't just down on his luck, he's near the end of his rope. But when he suddenly becomes the owner of a horse made of cast-off fabrics and magic, it brings him into a new life, one which includes a mysterious court magician.

I wanted to love this book. I pictured this review starting with a disclaimer about looking past the hokey title and cover. However, although I absolutely loved this author's previous book, this one was extremely uneven. 

The world is intriguing, but there are far more ideas introduced than are explored. For how important magic is to the story, I wish I had more of a sense of the scope of it, how the different kinds act, and how people actually perform it. 

I liked a lot of moments; Finn's narration is often entertaining. However, the crux of the problem was that I couldn't completely buy the romance at the center of the book. 

I don't think that a romance has to feature both perspectives, but when you limit the audience's insight to one viewpoint character, you have to work a lot harder to let them see the partner.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work here. Morgrim is too secretive early on for Finn (or the reader) to know what to believe. Finn's attraction is roughly believable, but Morgrim's is only lightly implied ... and then the story takes a sudden turn into some kink that is somehow both under-negotiated and over-explained. I'm not opposed to kink in my romance, but to work for me, it has to fit what I know of the characters and I have to believe in both characters' desires. Neither are really the case here, unfortunately.

Skimming/skipping the sex scenes leaves you with a decent romantic adventure in an interesting fantasy world. And that's a start toward a good book, but in this case the whole is less than the sum of its parts. 

All of that, plus the hokey art and title, knocks this down to:

2 Stars - An Okay Book