Set Muskets to Stun: A (Rant) Review of ‘The Hurricane Wars’ by Thea Guanzon

• The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon

• Published by LYX

• Fantasy, Romance, Enemies to Lovers

• Synopsis

  All Talasyn has ever known is the Hurricane Wars. Growing up an orphan in a nation under siege by the ruthless Night Emperor, Talasyn has found her family among the soldiers who fight for freedom. But she is hiding a deadly secret: light magic courses through her veins, a blazing power believed to have been wiped out years ago that can cut through the Night Empire's shadows.
  
  Prince Alaric, the emperor's only son and heir, has been forged into a weapon by his father. Tasked with obliterating any threats to the Night Empire's rule with the strength of his armies and mighty Shadow magic, Alaric has never been bested. That is until he sees Talasyn burning brightly on the battlefield with the magic that killed his grandfather, turned his father into a monster, and ignited the Hurricane Wars. In a clash of light and dark, their powers merge and create a force the likes of which has never been seen.
  
  Talasyn and Alaric both know this war can only end with them. But a greater threat is coming, and the strange new magic they can create together could be the only way to overcome it. Thrust into an uneasy alliance, they will confront the secrets at the heart of the war and find, in each other, a searing passion--one that could save their world...or destroy it.

Well well well if it isn’t the consequences of my actions. (Reading what I knew was published Reylo fanfiction despite having Major Doubts).

Here’s the thing. I’ve more than dabbled in the fanfiction world. I’ve written it in my day. I’ve read it. I’ve read ones that made me cry, made me kick my feet, made me squeal like a small child. I’ve definitely read fanfiction that I’ve gotten more out of than conventional novels I’ve read. However. Writing fanfic and writing novels has a totally different set of skills. Fanfiction doesn’t require world building or the creation and development of characters. Even in an alternate universe setting you can get away with shortcuts because the readers are just there to see their faves kiss and they broadly don’t really care about how a magic system might work.

The Hurricane Wars simply suffers from fanfiction syndrome. The world building seemed promising at first but is loose and confusing the more you get into it. The best major example I can give for this is how the army seems to work in this book. Apparently the entire defence of a nation is headed up by someone who defected from the invading army. This is of course the “resistance” in terms of Star Wars and makes sense in that setting. In this setting it leads to a lot of questions. Where are the rulers of this land? Is there no standing army? Were they so sure of peace that they didn’t think they would need one? There are mages in this world that control different elements but we only ever see shadow and light mages. Where are the rest and why aren’t they in the army? Why do people channel magic into creating airships instead of… anything else? This world simply doesn’t hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny.

““So you’re going to sneak into a country that’s notoriously unfriendly to outsiders and might possibly have dragons with the sole purpose of finding the Lightweave high up on a mountain using only a roughly sketched map, and you have no real idea what to do once you get there.” Khaede placed a hand over her eyes. “This war is lost.””

Let’s move onto our characters. Talasyn is our MFC and her defining trait is that she gets angry about everything. At the start of the book her ‘core wound’ is that she doesn’t know who her family is. Well she unceremoniously meets her dad 80 pages in and then promptly leaves him, despite yearning to find him being her only defining thought thus far. This is even bought up by her love interest later. He asks why she bothers to go back to a country that first treated her cruelly and then just plonked her into the army when she was 14. Her answer to this is confusion and, “Well. It just was the right thing to do.”

Talasyn has exactly one friend who stops appearing a quarter of the way into the book so Talasyn never has anyone to process any of her thoughts with or challenge anything she thinks. All the characters in her life seem to exist simply to push her towards our MMC, Alaric. She barely has a relationship with her father despite that being an essential part of her early character. She also frequently speaks about having no real sense of belonging anywhere she goes but also references the army as the ‘family she found along the way’ so there are real fundamental contradictions to her motivations. She just banters with Alaric and gets mad at him and that’s basically all she does.

Alaric is similarly flat. His defining trait is that he just does as his dad tells him and he broods a lot. And he’s tall. He does not come across as a menacing villain at any point and again barely spends time with people that aren’t Talasyn. He has exactly one good conversation with a friend in this book and it’s basically a highlight of normal human interaction in this whole book.

As a couple they are completely tedious. They just go through endless loops of “there is just ~something~ about them” to hating each other to lusting after one another to hating each other again. It is exhausting quite frankly. They are enemies on paper but channel most of that energy into arguing like children and engaging in light hearted banter while in the middle of actual fights to the not death. This somehow the second book I’ve read in a row where his people essentially committed genocide against hers and once again there is an astounding lack of awareness in the perpetrator that this is bad. It’s even worse in this book because Alaric’s side doesn’t stop at wiping out one group of people, they they decide to take the fight to the rest of the nation and commit multiple war crimes. Alaric defends this position throughout. This relationship is just fundamentally unbalanced because the crimes they/their people committed are just not the same.

“~I’m always so shortsighted when it comes to you.~ Talasyn seethed at the sullen emperor looming over her. Alaric had the habit of eclipsing everything else, making her throw caution to the wind for the sake of crossing blades and wits with him on the battlefields they’d fought over.”

Random other things that annoyed me in the first 100 pages:

• Alaric having multiple opportunities to kill Talasyn, someone he is actively fighting in a battlefield but is also using light magic and therefore the most evil of evils according to him but doesn’t kill her because ~vibes~

• Talasyn seeming like she had the opportunity to kill him (because she at one point stunned him with a head blow and stabbed him in the shoulder when she probably could have stabbed him in the neck) but doesn’t because ???

• Her being 19 and him being 26 just gave me the ick and feels unnecessary. Full adults lusting after teenagers, especially one that acts as immature as Talasyn, is never going to be comfortable for me even if it is technically fine.

• Talasyn and Alaric being imprisoned in the same cell despite being found in the middle of a brawl and Alaric’s clawed gauntlets weren’t taken away from him (remember I said every other character existed to get these two together)

• The soldiers interrogating Talasyn just answering all her random questions about the country she is now in instead of telling her to shut up

• Talasyn choosing to leave her newly found dad mere moments after meeting him

• Dragons are mentioned a lot in this book but are barely relevant so don’t get excited about that

• This feels very juvenile for an adult book

• After first 100 pages but the term, “his formidable maleness” will never fail to make me cringe

• Also this, no context required:

“The next time his men fired at Talasyn if she tried anything funny, their muskets would not be set to stun.”

I could go on but don’t want to get too deeply into spoilers. Part one feels completely disconnected from part two and for a book named The Hurricane Wars, the war itself ends less than a quarter into this book. This is a book about court bullshit which I typically enjoy but no one in this book is smart or compelling enough to make it interesting.

I may try something else from this author at a later date because the world was quite imaginative, the descriptions were evocative and there were some promising glimpses. I think Guanzon just needs to be set free from the shackles of manipulating an existing canon and just write one of their own.

Recommended for: Reylo shippers, older teens looking to move into their first adult novel