Week 19 Review: Winter's Orbit

From Goodreads:

Ancillary Justice meets Red, White & Royal Blue in Winter's Orbit, Everina Maxwell's gut-wrenching and romantic debut.

A famously disappointing minor royal and the Emperor's least favorite grandchild, Prince Kiem is summoned before the Emperor and commanded to renew the empire's bonds with its newest vassal planet. The prince must marry Count Jainan, the recent widower of another royal prince of the empire.

But Jainan suspects his late husband's death was no accident. And Prince Kiem discovers Jainan is a suspect himself. But broken bonds between the Empire and its vassal planets leaves the entire empire vulnerable, so together they must prove that their union is strong while uncovering a possible conspiracy.

Their successful marriage will align conflicting worlds.

My Review:
I quickly became very obsessed with this story. With audiobooks, I listen over the course of a couple of days, depending on how long it is. This book, which was 14 parts, 15.5 hours, and I listened to it in one day. And this is on top of me not being able to listen the whole time, and mostly at 1.5 speed, I finished just before 12 am. I just couldn't put this story down! I loved Kiem and Jainan's story! 

When I read reviews of this book, people seemed to have different opinions about whether this is more of a sci fi book or a romance. It's set in a sci fi world, that we don't get a lot of details of. It has romance, but it so very slow burn with kisses being fade to black, with some heart-breaking and warming misunderstandings. It's got a lot of political undertakings, and a bit of a murder mystery. There wasn't one part that was featured more, it's a mix of a bunch of different elements that add up to become this story.

Kiem and Jainan were such great characters to read about! Kiem feels intimidated by Jainan's brains, while Jainan feels intimidated by Kiem's social and outgoing nature. Oh, and they both found the other attractive, but since they wound up in an arranged marriage-just after and because of Jainan's previous partner, Taam-died. So it's complicated.

And of course Taam's death has further ramifications, besides having to have a new royal to marry Jainan to be the treaty representative. The reason why they need the treaty, well, the group that oversees that sees unrest there, and oh, I really enjoyed the investigation into his death and how it worked out-those there were some secrets that hurt! 

I learned while writing reviews that we're going to have another book in this world, Ocean's Echo and I can't express how excited I am for it. I mean, I feel like we barely scraped the surface. We learned that this empire is just a backwater collection of planets-so we really know little about the wider world. And the remnants-what the heck is going on with them? I want to know more! 

Loved reading this book, and I can't wait to see what Everina Maxwell writes next! 

Author: Everina Maxwell
Read: May 10th, 2022
Source: Library 
Reason Why: Sounded really good, and it's a DAC Book and a SAC 2022 Book! 
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: February 2nd 2021

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars