Winter’s Orbit Review

Not sure if this is a review, but can we talk about Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell for a moment? Or a lot of moments?

This title was recommended to me for a couple reasons.
1. I wrote a M/M trilogy
2. I was at a writing group saying how much I enjoyed A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (because I do. So much. Vulnerable boys being vulnerable is my jam.)

Winter’s Orbit isn’t as tender. It’s barely romantic at all, really. It is quite a space drama though. Forced political marriages. Past trauma. So much intrigue! All on this delightful landscape - a planetary system that has one working galactic link to the outer realms. One planet is the main governing body with the other lesser planets having their own culture and system of government, but each planet has a union (marriage) with someone in the main planet’s royal family. Then every twenty years an auditor shows up from the outer realms to renew a Treaty that keeps their whole system protected.

SO! One of the planets (Thea) doesn’t have good feelings for Iskat - the main planet. The Iskat partner of this union dies unexpectedly in an accident and the Thean representative has to marry someone else in the Iskat royal family very quickly since the Treaty signing is in about a month. Add in some very large questions regarding the accident, the death, and previous Iskat representative in the Thean / Iskat union and you have a LOT going on that has nothing to do with these men who are forced to marry at a moment’s notice. But there are moments. You have to squint at them but they are there.

There is also a badass assistant and I LOVE those.

I didn’t love this book as much the first time I read it, but some parts of it were haunting me (chapter 18), so I went ahead and got the audiobook. Guys. Do yourselves a favor and Get The Audiobook! Raphael Corkhill does SUCH a good job reading this book. His character voices are so great it almost seems like there are multiple narrators. (bonus points in that he made Jainan sound exactly like one of my good friends, so I love listening to him speak.) He really breathes life into this story, and I cannot get enough of it. I listened to the whole thing and then I tried to start something else, I really did, but I ended up just starting this back up again.

I think the thing that is getting to me the most is how my real life is mirroring some parts of this book in such a painful way that I keep listening to it and reading it to get the closure that I am being denied in reality. There is just something so wonderful about this awkward couple working through the same issues that I’m working through. Getting access to data. Reviewing it and realizing that there are some incredible errors in it that make huge differences in what is going on. Fighting scary accusations and allegations that are life-altering and not true. Having doubts about what they are seeing and how these obvious facts could have been missed by all the professionals who had access to the data before they did. People like the military. Like Internal Security. People who should not have screwed up as badly as they did, so you sit there and wonder - is what I’m looking at real? Could it be true that this really was missed? That no one caught this?

Then once you’ve determined that yes, we know what we’re looking at. THEN how do you take on those same government entities that are suddenly against you? Suddenly wanting to cover things up now that you’ve noticed them? Who do you turn to? How do you get past it?

So, yes, watching Kiem and Jainan work through these issues while at the same time they are learning how to be good partners for each other is my comfort read at the moment. The writing is technical but rich. The characters are fantastic. The world and political nuances are growing on me. And that’s saying something. Normally I want to skip all the techno-babble and all the politics. I just want character interaction, growth, and nurturing. I couldn’t care less what is going on in the world - just let me see my boys being together. Not with this title. I like seeing how everything fits together. It’s so well done.

I may have knit a pair of socks that match the cover. It’s just that good it deserves matching hand-knit socks to pay it tribute.

I’ll be finishing it up again here in the next couple of days. Maybe I’ll take a break afterward or maybe I’ll start it again. Maybe I’ll listen to Ocean’s Echo - read by the same narrator. And I’ll keep wishing for things to resolve in real life too.