SONGBIRD OF THE SORROWS

A princess enters a neighboring kingdom’s contest to marry its prince, but she’s secretly on a spy mission to find a hidden weapon.

Aella is a princess in disguise. When she was a child, her father sent her away from the palace to be raised in the Aviary, a secret espionage/military organization within the kingdom of the Sorrows. Very few people in the Aviary know Aella’s true identity, so when she completes her training and is given her first mission, she can’t share with her friends just how well-suited she is for the job. Aella is to travel to the nation of Eretria for the “trials,” in which women compete for the prize of marrying Prince Keres. The others on the mission believe Aella will be in disguise as the Sorrows’ mysterious princess, who is never seen publicly, but of course Aella is really in disguise as herself. The Aviary wants Aella to win the trials and stay in Eretria as the queen, spending the rest of her life as a spy. The rest of her cohort is being sent to retrieve a mysterious weapon that Eretria has hidden somewhere in the palace. As if being in disguise twice over isn’t enough for Aella, she also has to navigate the surprisingly deadly trials themselves—as well as the growing certainty that marriage to Prince Keres might be a fate worse than death. If the layers of secrecy aren’t confusing, it’s because their primary purpose is to serve as fun romantasy tropes rather than a real plot. The same goes for the added layer of confusion when Aella and her friends receive new bird-themed names as members of the Aviary: Giving the heroine an extra name like “Starling” and a sexy love interest called “Raven” reads more like an aesthetic flourish than something truly necessary to Aella’s character arc. Still, the seasonally themed kingdoms and some later developments leading to the next installment are well done, and compared to many of her more purple colleagues, Otto is relatively restrained when it comes to melodramatic imagery.

Standard-issue romantasy with a clever build toward a sequel.