If you are looking for an intricately created world with deeply defined characters interwoven within the threads of bigotry, class status and so much more then this is the book for you!
No insta love or gratuitous sex populate these pages just a well written story that had me captivated from beginning to end.
There is also a glossary of the Syrenese and Devian language included in the book, thank goodness as I would have been a little lost without it for reference.
The story revolves around main character Moreva Tehi an acolyte in the É (Temple) who has been banished to the outpost of Mjor for failing to attend a holiest of religious rites of her people.
I was fascinated watching as this young women learned to love, accept others for who they are and not what she perceives them to be, and along the way being faced with some hard truths about the basis of her religion and what she believed her people to be in the hierarchy of this world.
Lared Teger, chief of Mjor opens her eyes to a number of those truths and their feelings for each other develop and grow over the course of days and weeks.
This book is not a fast read; it should be entered into slowly and savored for all its outstanding
world building, character interactions, and spectacular story. Highly recommended!

2.5

I really wanted to like this book. If anyone has been paying attention to the sci-fi romance genre over the last few years, there are an awful lot of hulking, male, blue aliens. (I even wrote a whole blog post about it once.) It was notable to see the blue alien as the female for a change. Plus, I could see that the author was trying hard to subvert some literary tropes and social norms that I love seeing subverted. Unfortunately, I don't think she was wholly successful. Here's an example.

The main character is a priestess and her vestments are what many today would consider the clothing of prostitutes (tight, short dresses, corsets, garters, high heels and a riding crop). One of the regular religious ceremonies is an orgy. This could have been written to empower women in both their clothing choice and their sexuality. I think it maybe was even supposed to. Unfortunately, Bland then created a main character who hated the rite, showing her to panic and try and fight her way out of her obligated orgies. Thereby undermining any empowerment she may have created and reducing the character again to a woman performing unwanted sexual acts, i.e. The Whore.

As a side note: no reason is given for this particular choice of religious uniform (other than that the goddess liked it) and, since there are both male and female Moreva, I couldn't help but wonder if the male Moreva also wore corsets, short/tight dresses, garters, and high heals and were the epicenter of 20+ person orgies. It's never discussed, but I rather hope so.

My main complaint however is that there is barely a story here. We're told the main character is horribly bigoted. The plot is supposed to hinge on it. But we never see it. In fact, she befriends one of the people she's supposedly so bigoted against almost immediately and treats him as an equal, submitting herself to his instruction and offering her assistance from almost the moment they meet. I never felt her bigotry, but I was told about it regularly. Similarly, the reader is subjected to several context-less dream sequences in which she symbolically fights said bigotry, but we never see her making real world changes to her behavior (as it never appeared bigoted to start with). And lastly, the romance comes out of no where. The reader is told about it, but I didn't feel it develop even a little bit. There's a predictable twist at the end and then it all wraps up almost miraculously.

All in all, I felt that despite good intentions and even an interesting idea for a world, the whole thing just never developed into anything I enjoyed spending time with. I was honestly bored most of the times. The writing is perfectly readable though, and I had no issue with the editing (even though I read an ARC). I think I'd be willing to give a Bland book another chance. She can obviously write, but this particular book wasn't a winner for me.

I gave up on this book at around 50%. The main character is infuriating and makes poor decisions constantly. A lot of the conflict she deals with regarding her religion is vague or doesn't make sense. As well as the conflict she has with a different race of people. She comes across as ignorant and very unlikable which is strange for a romance. The amount of made up terms that are peppered throughout the book don't do any favors for the reader and only create confusion and annoyance. A sci-fi story does not need made up words to be a good sci-fi. More detail on surroundings and less detail on the main character's daily habits would have helped. The love interest is so bland and one-dimensional that I did not care at all about him or his relationship to the heroine. The dialog was awkward and the steamy scenes were very boring. Overall, I was very disappointed with this book. I would not recommend this book to anyone.