Review: The Wicked Bargain

 

So it is possible I went into this with overly high expectations. Because I mean – gay! Non-binary! Pirates! Of course my expectations will be high! And because my expectations were so high, they weren’t quite met. Nothing about it was actively bad, but nothing was that great, either. There were a few random elements throughout that made it just not quite land right for me. First, it never really addressed some of the conflict around piracy and murder. To be clear – I am well on board for something goofy like Pirates of the Caribbean or Our Flag Means Death that just sort of flings it around without addressing it, because that’s not meant to be the point. The issue was, it seemed like the author wanted to address it; Mar thought about the morality of murder and enjoying fighting multiple times. But fundamentally the book wanted to just be a swashbuckling pirate adventure, and there wasn’t really room to address those issues, so they just sort of floated around muddling the story.

Also, the signaling surrounding Dami was really unclear. Mar thought A LOT about how attractive Dami was for their relationship to be purely platonic (and frankly I didn’t feel like it was fully fleshed out as a platonic relationship either). I genuinely spent most of the book thinking that it was either heading towards a love triangle or a polyamorous relationship, but nope. So that was just an odd dynamic. Finally, the dialogue was trying to be snappy and quippy, but it wasn’t really landing for me, partially because Mar’s character never really felt fully realized – it was like they spent all their time thinking about their magia, dysphoria, Dami being annoyingly attractive, or wanting to save their father, but there wasn’t really a person underneath that. Which I suppose could itself be a character study, but the character development never reached that level for me. So generally again – nothing terribly wrong with it, but not what I was hoping it would be, either.