2.5 rounded up.

Good flow, serviceable prose, interesting setting and worldbuilding. Great action scenes, better than plenty of fantasy I’ve read. Predictable plot structure, fun invoking of tropes. One or two classic subversions. Where the wheels come off almost completely for me is the character work.

I get that for some people the kink is precisely loss of agency here, but Poppy doesn’t really feel like she’s empowered just because she’s been trained to fight. Every person she comes across probes her boundaries, especially Hawke, of course. I don’t find Poppy all that believable as a character. There a few stand out good scenes to characterize her and they’re genuinely moving. But then her reactions in regards to Hawke are so contrary and weird. She is conflicted, sure. But the entire conceit of the character is that as a reader you essentially find the loss of agency and inability to know what boundaries are or assert them… even as she thinks through bypassing them and calling herself an idiot all the time. It’s really annoying and sometimes icky at a meta level, imo.

Meanwhile Hawke, the older man is I think written to give the veneer of consent, but continually proves with his actions that he’s not about it at all. It’s careful so that it’s not ownership over Poppy, but at the same time actual consent isn’t really possible due to the circumstances, which are spoilers.

The book is at its best when it straddles consent and fun, sexy boundary pushing. But there’s too many subversions of it. I was looking forward to the sex positivity to be empowering but it never happens. Even remotely. In every estimation Hawke is a bad person and it would have been more interesting for it to be an outright descent for Poppy than just handwave so much stuff because of her age and manner of upbringing.