This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.
Florid, breathless, filled with stomach-churning effluvia and old skool as all get-out, but also self-aware enough to know what it’s done and where it’s going, Soulgazer is an extremely dramatic peek at the life of an utterly helpless waif cursed with Too Much Power, the witty pirate who is magnetically drawn to her, and the love that binds them together in spite of it all. It’s campy, but not campy enough to really make it a legendary hoot — a D+ read that mostly kept me entertained due to its ripeness.
Ever since she was a literal infant, Saoirse has been cursed with an extremely powerful, volatile and unpredictable magic that has resulted in her father imprisoning her in an isolated cabin with no human contact after she accidentally kills her brother. This was because of her touching a soulstone after being kidnapped by her grandmother, who thought Saoirse’s death would bring an end to her own curse. Most people who touch soulstones — which are formed when a person dies – go mad or die themselves. She violently suppresses the magic as hard as she can with the help of an amulet, but its protections aren’t perfect. The only way out of her isolation is marriage to the Stone King, who is notoriously rough and mean. This will provide a political alliance for her father, the king of their island, and thus make her useful to him and get him some heirs. If that means having the amulet’s runestone symbol tattooed on her back so her husband will never know she’s got such gifts, so be it.
She is too much of a marshmallow for marriage to such a guy, naturally. Fortunately for Saoirse, she’s heard legendary tales of the roguish pirate Wolf of the Wild since she was young – it is later established that they are only two years apart in age so I guess I can buy a teenager thinking a teenage pirate is cool?
Faolan, said Wolf of the Wild, is luckily in-port when she manages her daring escape. Saoirse seeks him out on the eve of her wedding, thinking he might give her passage to the Isle of Lost Souls, which is the only place in the world strong enough to absorb her magic, as it was created by the now-dead gods her people once worshipped. They instead strike a bargain. They enter into a handfasting of convenience and she promises to guide him to the invisible lost Isle of Lost Souls using her powers. Her father and former fiance are not happy. Let the chase begin.
Warning: you are entering nigh-on cartoonish territory with this one, and I admit I couldn’t stop giggling in the wrong places. The magical system kept me reading, as did the charming if stereotypical and egotistical Faolan, so I’m keeping this at a solid D+.
Poor Saoirse is the most put-upon heroine I’ve read about in centuries. Her magic is mighty but the suppression of it is painful. So is the tattoo her parents place upon her skin to force her into keeping her magic in tight. Until she meets Faolan, a lot of this reads like misery porn. She does have a core of strength and dignity, but watching her flail around and throw up and be victimized and hurt can be painful to see in a not-fun way, and it goes on for pages and pages. She desperately resists her magic, believing that she’s to blame for trauma and death, but even when it shows its positive side, she thinks her father’s lies about her powers are right instead of taking in what she sees before her. By the end of the book she finally starts to unleash herself, and that is a blessing to the narrative, which can finally stop focusing on her suffering.
Faolan, meanwhile, is your classic roguish pirate. Killian Jones from Once Upon a Time and Jack Sparrow are his clear role models. His shivers timber. But he’s fun and a sensual enough presence. He and Saiorsie bring out the best in one another even though he and his crew are pretty mean toward her at first and even though Saoirse has to keep reminding herself that oh no, this isn’t a real marriage! But he does get her to at least show some spirit and spunk and call him out on things, so that’s a relief.
The villains here – Saiorsie’s dad and the Stone King – are noncomplex: the personalities are broad, and the adventure kind of predictable. The language used here on occasion made me giggle. Every time a character exclaimed feck all I could think of was Father Ted – definitely not a comparison I wanted to think of for multiple reasons, especially during the love scenes.
It’s flawed, and it’s sometimes accidentally funny, but I have to admit I was never bored while reading Soulgazer. I’d definitely take the sequel out of the library instead of buying it, however – unless I were offered buried pirate’s treasure.