![]() Kiem has carefully constructed his reputation as the evanescently charming, scandal-prone prince who leads an unfettered life, and he did it in much the same way one might erect a brick façade, or drape armor around their body. Prince Kiem, on the other hand, offers a very good counterpart to Jainan. There are so few literary accounts of domestic abuse in queer relationships (something I read a while ago about it still haunts me: “when your love is taboo, so are its violences.”) so stories like Winter’s Orbit are crucial in expanding the scope of the queer experience. It casts a vast, horrible shadow over your relationships and leaves you unmoored. Abuse, the novel hauntingly illustrates, carves a wound so deep and so hidden it takes a very long time to find it and address it. It’s a devastating topic, but Maxwell handles it with sensitivity, complexity, and so much care. ![]() Through Jainan’s character, the author plumbs the cavernous depths of domestic abuse, tracing the interwoven strands of shame, anger, guilt, and sometimes even grief, that cling to survivors after they’re freed from their abusers. The full picture soon begins to bloom like a stain across the paper: the full arc of Jainan’s traumatic relationship with his abusive ex-husband, who, for five years, had used his position as an imperial prince to etch the knowledge of powerlessness directly into Jainan’s heart, cutting all Jainan’s tethers-his family, his friends, his dreams-and making sure Jainan had no ally but his abuser, which is to say, that he had no ally at all. Most chilling, however, is the sense that Jainan’s private, repeated mantras carry the echo of someone else’s voice. The reader does not immediately understand why Jainan moves so timidly through his life, always guarded, always careful, like he was waiting for a blow why he often has to realign his whole world around a single act of kindness or why everything he thought and did tends towards an all-pervasive self-loathing. This comes with a sense of foreboding, a whisper of wrongness. From the moment we meet him, Jainan carries himself with the flinching weariness of a man with memories that require iron cages, kept still and quiet and captive so they did not devour him whole. Jainan’a chapters are some of the novel’s most painful and wounding sections. The novel is also, thrillingly, just as emotionally satisfying. Winter’s Orbit represents everything in the genre for which I have an unaffected fondness: an extraordinarily believable and imaginative world with varied forces forming a tremulous web of fraught coexistence, complicated political machinations, the racy adventurous feel of a mystery left unsolved, deftly rendered characters that drive straight to your heart, and an ineffably tender romance that wraps around you like a thick wool robe-all woven through a superbly assured prose to create the kind of masterful storytelling that wells up to pull the reader into a unique and unforgettable experience. The high concept of “ a wayward, scandal-magnet prince and an intensely serious, duty-bound scholar are drafted into a political marriage and forced to work together in order to prevent an interplanetary war” tells you all you need to know about this book, but it only scratches the surface of the story’s many delights. Ironically, trouble finds our characters from the outset of the novel. ![]() I yearned for the escape I knew the story would bring, and for the space of a few hundred pages, I felt weightless, like all the trouble in the world had lifted from my shoulders. Those moments when I would step outside myself and step inside the story were the only moments my mind could shut off its rigor and everything in me would settle like silt. I had the opportunity to read an early copy of this book a few weeks ago, while caught in the dreary throes of finals and deadlines, and the story was like a rope thrown into a churning sea, mooring me to some semblance of sanity. ![]() There is truly nothing the restive embrace of a good story cannot fix and Winter’s Orbit is a damn good story. ![]()
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