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.
Croome writes clean, uncomplicated prose that never gets in its own way, a real asset for a first novel moving at this speed. You're never stuck rereading a sentence to figure out what just happened. The world-building leans light rather than immersive: there's an invented vocabulary for the witches' magic that shows up periodically without ever feeling load-bearing, more flavor text than function, and the dialogue has a habit of repeating itself, with characters restating positions they've already made clear. Neither issue derails the book, but a tighter edit would have kept the middle stretch, which some readers find sags after a strong start, feeling less like padding and more like plot.
What Reign does well, it does with real force. The back half turns the screws on Niamh's disguise, her loyalties, and the war itself all at once, and the emotional beats in that stretch land harder than the first half sets you up to expect. Croome is writing about the cost of hiding, from the people who raised her and the people who might love her if she let them, and that theme lands cleanest late in the book, as the war closes in and hiding stops being an option.
Why you should read
- Fans of Mulan-style disguised-heroine plots
- Readers who want a love triangle with real stakes
- Romantasy fans who prioritize pace over deep worldbuilding
- Anyone who likes battlefield stakes with their romance
What to expect
- Brisk pacing with frequent, graphic battle scenes
- A hidden-identity romance split between two love interests
- Clean, approachable prose typical of a strong debut
- A middle stretch that slows before the back half hits
- An ending built to launch a sequel
Reign reads like a series starter, and it ends laying track for what comes next instead of wrapping everything up. What carries over is Niamh herself: a would-be blacksmith who went to war under someone else's name and came out of it far more certain of her own.
