This is a post-apocalyptic ride of a novel with many a comparison to the Mad Max movies. Desert wastelands, thrilling motorcycle rides, and dinosaur-like creatures await in these pages!
Jin-Lu, our main character, is a mage-bike courier, which means she has an aesthetically cool and extremely dangerous job taking messages and cargo across the wastelands between domed cities. For the last few years, her job has been carrying messages on her awesome magic motorcycle between two royals in different cities, Prince Kadrin and Princess Yi-Nereen. But one day, Yi-Nereen tells her she has to escape her city before she’s married off to someone she doesn’t love. So, she gets Jin to take her across the wastelands on her mage-bike to find Kadrin so they can be together and she can escape her controlling father.
This is the first book in a duology, and by the time I reached the end, I was fully invested. There was a bit of a slow start I had to push through, but by the last third I was hooked, especially as more characters were introduced and the plot thickened.
The main topic addressed in Road to Ruin is how magic is inherited and passed on between generations. The city leaders are very invested in setting up the perfect matches for those with a Talent, because it’s the people with Talents who keep the cities safe by creating shields when storms roll in. But the number of Talented individuals keeps dwindling, despite the efforts to arrange marriages between Talented and the systemic oppression of the Untalented. The eugenics parallel is not subtle, especially as the book nears the end and more plot starts getting revealed. I hope the magic system gets explained more in book two!
As for the romance subplot, it was hovering in the background but not super prevalent aside from being the key reason Jin, Yi-Nereen and Kadrin know each other. It seems to be setting up for more in the sequel. Jin has fallen for both Kadrin and Yi-Nereen through being their courier and reading their love letters, so some kind of (actual) love triangle is going on, and I’m interested to see where it goes! The letters themselves are interspersed throughout the book, which provides backstory and lets us see how the three of them are so closely tied together. Jin puts on a cold exterior, but since most of the book is from her POV, we get to see that actually she’s a huge softie and she’s just pushing her romantic feelings way down deep.
To me, Road to Ruin has a similar feeling to Blood Over Bright Haven and The Space Between Worlds, so if you liked either of those, I think this one might be a good fit! I quite enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to the sequel—which, thankfully, I don’t have to wait for, because it came out earlier this year!
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