A River of Golden Bones by AK Mulford

Source: NetGalley, many thanks to the publisher!
TL;DR: While the characters were a bit flat and one-note the world and magic was very interesting. If you aren’t a character driven reader this could be a real winner!

Plot: What begins as a love triangle arranged marriage turns into an almost spurned fated mate (by our main character) journey to save her Sleeping Beauty style sister.
Characters: Very flat, very lackluster sadly
Setting: I really liked the setting and felt it was different from others in the genre with it’s focus more on werewolves than anything else
Magic: Besides the werewolf magic, which was very interesting I felt the ‘dark magic’ needed a bit more work perhaps?

Thoughts:

I’ve been dipping my toes in and out of ‘Romantasy’ books. This is not the worst of those but it wasn’t the best! AK Mulford has a lot of potential and she’s likely going to be an author I watch moving forward. The story starts as a lot of books in this genre start with the love triangle of a two twins and man caught in the middle. But the story quickly turns.

This is a world I found really fascinating, and ultimately that’s what kept me going. The world is ruled by families of werewolves who protect and watch over each kingdom. Humanity, with it’s varied cultures and lives live with and in some cases simply beneath the werewolves. Hints at this conflict and imbalance of power setup what I think may be explored in the next books, which will be very interesting. In addition this is a mostly queer-normative society but also with some strangely traditional views on gender duties, we shall say. This conflict felt shoehorned in for the sake of conflict, but could be explored in an interesting way in the future.

The story itself also had some interesting twists in turns. Part of this was a Sleeping Beauty retelling, part of this was a journey of self discovery. Each time the story setup a trope I was ready to roll my eyes at, it managed to twist it in a way I found interesting and I did enjoy!

The characters are the major flaw of this one for me. They are fairly simple, one note and with little to endear them. Each felt like a good representation of the type of character they were meant to be but with little else. That was the biggest problem I had, and the reason for the three star rating. Additionally I feel… unsure about big conflict at the end in which our villain threw the main character’s gender identity in their face and attempted to use it to divide their relationship up. I didn’t care for that personally.

A mixed bag, and one I think I will remember. I’ll keep my eye on AK Mulford in the future, and if you enjoy Fantasy Romance I think this might be one a lot of people will enjoy!

3 out of 5 golden wolves