Let's Talk Books

Fated Winds and Promising Seas had a lot going for it. It was a pirate-y MM romance, with strong mental health rep, and a diverse found family at its heart. At the start, I thought this was on its way to being one of my favourite reads ever, if there is one thing I am a sucker for, it is relationships built on genuine care, but the plot went in a whole lot of directions, and as we neared the mid-way point I found myself increasingly confused.

I do wonder if this book is a victim of the impatience and shortening attention spans of readers everywhere. Black manages to get, into one not especially long book, a series of events that might once had spanned, and sustained, a trilogy. We skip time, loose events of emotional importance and / or plot relevance to glossed over summaries, and manage to wrap up a plot that has gone entirely sideways in the last few pages. I don’t want to claim not to have enjoyed some elements of this book. The characters were largely well written, and the relationship between Gabriel and Lucky intense and wonderful, but equally I had a lot of issues with the pacing, and just keeping track of the rapid and sudden changes of direction.

So much happens in this book, and very little of it is predictable. I get the sense that swathes of this were cut out, largely because of the clunky segues, as scenes suddenly morph into something else, and I think that is a real shame. Ultimately this book needed more space, more time, more of a chance to spiral out into a world. Black has clearly put energy into building a universe we only get to see in snatched moments, and must learn to understand as we rocket through literal years of the character’s lives.

2.5 stars.