Book of the Day

From the review

Reign moves like someone trying to outrun a rumor: quick, tense, rarely still. Bethan Croome's romantasy debut opens with Niamh trading a blacksmith's hammer for a soldier's sword, and she'd rather it were the other way around. She'd rather be shaping metal at her father's forge than swinging a blade on a battlefield, but an exposed secret and a war draft don't leave room for preference. She cuts her hair, passes herself off as her brother, ends up conscripted into the king's army by mistake, and spends the rest of the book white-knuckling a lie two feet from anyone who might notice. That tension sets the pace. Croome keeps the battles coming, and the fights themselves are graphic enough to draw blood on the page, with monsters that have real weight and wounds that cost something. The romance is where Croome puts her real energy, split two ways. Prince Fitzroy is the commanding officer sworn to hunt down the exact thing Niamh is hiding, and their scenes carry the specific friction of a woman forced to obey a man built to destroy her. Bash is the softer pull, a fellow soldier at camp who sees Niamh more clearly than anyone else does, which is exactly what makes him dangerous to her disguise. The chemistry runs on tension more than heat, built out of stolen glances and near-misses in a war camp where privacy doesn't exist, and Croome commits to that slow burn instead of rushing it. Croome uses the triangle to show what Niamh needs at different moments more than to set up a simple choice: protection from one, recognition from the other. Readers chasing a slow burn that actually pays off will find the triangle earns its payoff in the back half.