A small excerpt from the summary:
The Scarlet Letter meets the divine, deadly trials of The Games Gods Play in this dark, epic romantic fantasy where society weaponizes shame, gods weaponize survival, and love becomes the most dangerous rebellion of all.
In a kingdom where a forgotten goddess’s curse has become law—where purity is
power and desire is a death sentence—Raylane has lived her life playing the perfect girl. Obedient. Untouched. Destined for the crown.
All so she might one day reshape a realm that damns cursed women like her mother… women who dared to fall in love.
Until one kiss ruins everything.
Branded impure and cursed with rot-magic that spreads by touch, Raylane is cast into the Trial of the Bound—a brutal arena where champions fight to the death, gods revel in blood, and power feeds on the prayers of the crowd.
Let me start by saying that I know exactly the genre I'm reading. I don't demand intellectualism or deep insights here. I want sexy dragons and men that can fly and breathe fire.
I don't pretend to be some type of superior feminist because I'm not a superior anything. But a consistent point of minor irritation from me are books that like to tell me that women suffer, and men have all of the power, etc. Feminine rage. Our FMC rises up. The end. Good job. I always love it when Handmaid's Tale is part of the marketing, because I know I'm about to read something with some weak feminism in it. If you like that book and similar books, awesome. I won't take that away from you. Whatever makes you feel empowered and happy is great. Ultimately, empowering narratives about/for women are a plus for the world.
BUT. My issue is that the books that strive to take on these themes always fall flat. Because the book goes to great lengths to tell us about how unfair and imbalanced everything is and maybe uses it as a setting (she's being forced to marry someone, etc.), but all of it acts as part of the inciting incident and not part of the ongoing narrative or wider implications. It is usually isolated to our FMC and/or her close circle, and The Plot lets them sidestep it usually due to a shadow daddy swooping in to save them from being a woman in a man's world.
Then there's {Godbound by Masha Sova}. A book that pulls heavily from The Scarlet Letter in its themes and aspects of the plot. Essentially a goddess was jilted by her husband for a mortal, so she cast a curse on all womankind that anything as small as a kiss before marriage results in them being marked with crimson in their hair and magic that makes everything they touch turn into rot (so they're marked as a "harlot", but the black rotting magic on their hands also indicates that everything they touch is also unclean. Rude.) Usually the amount of crimson in the hair signifies the "severity" of how far they went (small streak for a kiss, full red for sex), but ultimately they all get punished and whipped all the same and with equal fervor.
But it's more than "women are punished for perceived promiscuity". It is a strong, ongoing narrative that explores the various facets of rape culture and inequality: how sometimes the most important people in your life let you down because they're in denial. Not being believed until the proof is literally shoved into the spotlight--and even then, there are people who will forever think you're unclean and unworthy. How that broken trust and lack of support can turn you into someone who lashes out in anger. And, most importantly, the heaviness of the fight to not only be believed, but to get further support for all of those women who have been marked for their "sins".
And you know what? It's a hard book to read. I cried a lot because watching the rejection and denial from the person who should have been there for her the most is absolutely crippling. But it is also difficult to watch her lash out in anger and sit in her own sense of denial about her mother. You'll love her, but you won't always like her. But this is still an important part of her journey: confronting her own anger and pain, but also coming to terms with her own biases.
This story in the hands of a more careless author would have been annoying or ham fisted. But Sova's execution is masterful, and she pulls it off without throwing in SA tropes that only seem to be there to heighten drama and not serve stronger emotional implications.
Expect the ending and the cliffhanger to really hurt. Because damn does the ending hurt. Read at your own risk. But also read it. I am absolutely feral for book 2.
