The Powerless Trilogy

The barest hint of heat, which suited the book far better than the alternative would have. It is funnier than the cover suggests, and the humour is never at a character's expense. The prose gets out of its own way exactly when it needs to.

The hidden identity setup is the strongest thing here and the trials are genuinely tense, but the pacing between them sags. There are stretches where the plot only moves because somebody withholds information for no reason except to keep the secret alive another fifty pages. I liked Paedyn far more when she was solving a problem than when she was avoiding a conversation. That said, the last quarter is excellent and the final twenty pages bought back a fair amount of goodwill. I will read the sequel, just with calmer expectations.

I picked this up expecting a standard trials plot and got completely wrecked by it instead. Paedyn spends the whole book performing a competence she does not have, and Roberts writes that panic so well that I kept catching myself holding my breath during the quiet scenes rather than the fights. The Purging Trials are brutal in a way that feels earned instead of shocking for its own sake, and every time I was sure a challenge would resolve with a convenient reveal, it did not. What sold me completely is Kai. He is written as someone who has been told his whole life that mercy is a defect, and the slow admission that he no longer believes it is the actual romance. The banter is good, but the banter is not the point. My one complaint is that the middle third leans on the same misunderstanding for too long, and I wanted the court politics of Ilya to get more room than they get. I still finished this at two in the morning and bought the sequel before I went to sleep, so whatever the flaws are, they did not stop me.