Warden, by Delyth Angharad

[rowyn]

Warden is an M/M fantasy romance novella, around 36,000 words. It has two plots that run in parallel: a fantasy action-adventure as the two protagonists investigate some nefarious/mysterious activity on behalf of their king, and a romance as they figure out what sort of relationship they want.

I enjoyed the novella on the strength of the protagonists being adorable together. The main characters, Alwyn and Dain, are well-drawn and distinctive. Alwyn is sober, serious and angsty, while Dain hides all his angst behind a façade of charm and gregariousness. There is some friction in the romance plot, but for the most part the characters try to be mature, sensible and honest. I always love that in a story.

To me, the adventure plotline was a way to keep the characters occupied while they fell in love. It involved a lot of “protagonist gets captured and/or beat up and then other protagonist rescues them”. So it provided some good hurt/comfort moments. The protagonists took turns rescuing each other: one of my most beloved tropes.

The ending is perplexing, because it doesn’t resolve either the romantic or action plotlines. It’s not a cliffhanger, in the sense that the protagonists are in a good position to continue both relationship and investigation. But it doesn’t feel finished, either.

The Amazon blurb describes Warden as “light on violence” and with no killing of humans, and the last is only true if you decide the flashback about war crimes doesn’t count. If your baseline for violence is something like Game of Thrones, fair, it’s light on violence in comparison. If your baseline is Pride and Prejudice, it’s got quite a lot of violence. XD

There are some typos/formatting oddities (I noticed several instances where dialogue should’ve ended with a comma but used a period, and vice versa), but it wasn’t enough to hamper my enjoyment of the story.

So overall, this was a fun story with some lovely sweet scenes between the protagonists. I expect there will be a sequel and I plan to read it. It's a solid 8. n_n