Review: Heartless Hunter

 

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by this one! It’s a fairly traditional enemies-to-lovers setup, and there’s not anything super out of the box, but I was shocked by how invested I got in Rune and Gideon’s relationship (I know – JAY getting invested in STRAIGHT PEOPLE?). There were also a few elements that I particularly enjoyed. 

First, despite this being a YA romantasy, there’s actually a shocking amount of complexity and nuance that gets conveyed. We’re introduced to a world in which witches are brutally hunted and executed, which of course sets the reader up to side with Rune, the witch in hiding. But as the book goes on, it becomes very clear that the revolution that overthrew the witches was very much justified. The story does a really good job of showing the ways that privilege can change rapidly and how people can be talking about two entirely different things without even realizing it when it comes to power dynamics.

Spoilers on this one!

Another thing I thought this book approached really well is allowing a male character to have been a victim of sex abuse. This is not something that comes up often at all in books period, and in this instance it does an interesting job in terms of changing power dynamics around throughout the book. Of course I will always defer to the opinion of survivors, but I appreciated the way the subject was approached.

Spoilers end.

And finally, like I mentioned above, the relationship was just very sweet and lovely. Two very messed up people learning from one another and making each other better – until they really don’t. I’m genuinely excited for the sequel.

This would be very close to being a full five star read, but there was one thing I couldn’t get over. There was very little diversity of any kind in this book. If I remember correctly (I may have missed some descriptions) the characters are overwhelmingly white, and there are no queer characters at all that I remember. Now, not all books have to be extremely diverse, and there can certainly be reasons for certain fantasy worlds to be more or less diverse. But it’s always odd when we see a highly unequal world in one specific regard – witches vs. humans in this case – but don’t see any inequality mentioned in any regard. It didn’t seem like any thought was even given to the way other power dynamics might play out in this world, which was really disappointing. Even so, really enjoyable, just needed a bit more to get pushed into the five star range.