Defying my expectations, rather than a conventional male-led harem A.R. Rend‘s The Honor of Duty turned out more like a genderswapped female-lead harem… although it’s not a simple copy/paste job and some effort was expended so that the women still have feminine traits while the men still have masculine ones. The result is a mix of both interesting and awkward aspects with, for me at least, the latter outweighing the former by the end.
Meghan Le Fay‘s first Dragonbound Chronicles novel starts out like it’s going to be a standard ‘enemies to lovers’ kind of thing and then unfurls in a very different direction. While for the most part it’s quite good, good enough that I could even forgive the questionable communication issues and ludicrous mistaken identity subplot, the utterly bizarre twist toward the end with the attacking army completely extinguished any interest in following it further.