When migrating over all my old livejournal reviews I found my rec for this when it was a work in progress being posted in parts over on lj, in 2010. Six years later, it's FINALLY finished. I reread the first two books and then immediately read the third one, because these are the kind of books you read all of in a weekend without stopping for air.
It's a delightful story about my favorite character types; Laurent is cold and mean and secretly damaged and alone in the world, Damen is sweet and emotional and will destroy things to protect Laurent. Once they're friends, of course; they start out as enemies, then become grudging allies, and by the third book they are so delightfully in love that I could read just those parts over and over and be a really happy person. I'm just going to shout, cousin Charls! and if you've read the book you know why we're all so happy about it.
A couple of caveats -- the third book doesn't make a ton of sense if you think about it too carefully, and I've had a lot of really fun conversations about how to fix the pacing and a couple of plot holes. The author borrows heavily from both Dunnett and Guy Gavriel Kay in terms of characters and also plots, and it did occasionally make me go, "Oh, come on, this is fan fiction." Which isn't necessarily a complaint; Lymond could certainly use a nice boyfriend who will kill people for him (Jerrott). Oh, and the ending is a little abrupt, but apparently there will some follow-up stories or something.
If this is your kind of thing, it will be VERY much your kind of thing. It was certainly mine.
Grade: A
#6-8 in 2016
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