It’s nice to be surprised once in a while, although maybe this book shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve been losing steam with my Illumicrate book box subscriptions; I cancelled my quarterly horror box after the third book in a row that I already had, and upon reading the description of the book that turned out to be S.A. MacLean’s Voidwalker, I very nearly skipped it. To be clear, the way Illumicrate works is their boxes are semi-blind; they’ll give you a description and a theme but you’ll have to do a bit of detective work if you want to know the actual title of the book before it shows up on your doorstep. And as Illumicrate’s main subscription line has been leaning far too hard into romantasy lately for my tastes, and the brief description of Voidwalker I had felt pretty bog-standard for the genre, I was disinclined to pay for it at first. Then I learned that the author was the same person who had written the excellent The Phoenix Keeper and decided to go ahead and let it ride.

(I suddenly find myself wondering how MacLean managed to get featured in two Illumicrate boxes in less than a year; her agent may be owed a raise.)

The premise still isn’t the most original thing on the planet, even considering that romantasy is a genre ruled by the trope and its biggest fans seem to literally want a checklist of Things What Are Supposed to Happen that they can go through as they’re reading. The main character is a smuggler; there’s a turf war happening between two members of a vaguely-fascistic race of antlered and tailed humanoids who each rule a chunk of the world and, oh, also eat people; the turf war turns into a revolution, and one of the daeyari (those are the monsters; I’m picturing Nightcrawler with antlers, but not blue) turns out to be really sexy.

And … well. There’s an interesting mix of fantasy and science fiction going on here, the main character rides a Void Horse, which is a horse that is actually a lizard, possibly my favorite kind of horse; and there’s lots of hints at a wider world that I assume will pay off in future sequels. I’m being snarky, but I didn’t really expect much from Phoenix Keeper and loved it; I expected even less from Voidwalker and enjoyed it enough to write about it and recommend it. MacLean has a great grasp of character that serves this book quite well; the relationships between MC Fionamara and the other secondary characters in the book are what keeps the book interesting, and while Antal, the daeyari, initially comes off as the same Tall Dark and Scary broody big-dicked male character that I’ve read about in a thousand Sarah J. Maas books and more recently in Alchemised, he’s got enough unexpected twists to his personality that I ended up liking him by the end. And while I hate the phrase “slow burn,” MacLean takes her time with the romance angle of things, so by the time Fi and Antal start boning it feels earned and not inevitable.

Honestly, my biggest gripe is a deeply nerdy one, which is that S.A. MacLean doesn’t know the difference between antlers and horns. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until recently, but now that I do I’m going to notice every time the words are misused in books for the rest of my life. There are other differences, but antlers are shed, and horns are permanent, and what the daeyari have are horns, even though they look like what you’re probably picturing when you hear the word “antler.” This would have been less of a big deal was it not an actual plot point that daeyari horns grow throughout their entire immortal-unless-killed lives and so you can get an idea of how old one is by the number of points and bends in the horns. So they are definitely horns and not antlers.

And now you know. Even if you weren’t interested in the book, hopefully the random factoid made reading the post worth it.