The Heartstone Thief

What do we have here? Fantasy romance involving a dark, dangerous yet alluring love interest, shrouded in mystery and black leather. That would normally be the most common description for a paranormal heartthrob in this genre. The dagger-wielding, throat-slitting, permanently brooding type.

Only, in The Heartstone Thief, it's a woman!

Told from the point of view of swashbuckling thief Curtis Vance - and I can't remember the last time I read from the perspective of a male first-person narrator - The Heartstone Thief starts right with the "bonding" between the unsuspecting protagonist and arcane sorceress Shaianna, after she's been awakened from the artefact he has been paid to steal. In a world where magic is nonexistent, or rather persecuted, he's still not convinced of her powers and only reluctantly heads off to retrieve the gem she's after, if only for his own ulterior motives.

Now, supernaturally binding two characters to eachother is always a nice way of a) preventing them from being separated for too long, thus pushing on the plot, b) forcing them to work together, and c) building up romance. And, I mean, the blurb is pretty obvious about it.

The gender-reversal in this novel is amazing though. I chuckled to myself whenever Vance is absolutely terrified of, yet feels drawn to Shaianna, or every time he mentions her flawless, gloomy looks and deadly fighting skills in the same sentence. While he's not incapable of surviving by himself, most of the time he is the damsel in distress, and Shaianna rushes to his rescue. Once reading this book, I became painfully aware of the foreignness of this role allocation. The way the male protagonist refers to and is wary of the love interest, the inequality of power and even physical strength between them, the overall inversion of tropes, is just not the norm, and I loved it. I'd read a thousand books like this one.

[full review on goodreads.com]