chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > Winter's Orbit

If the high concept of “a wayward, scandal-magnet prince and a serious, duty-bound scholar are drafted into a political marriage and forced to work together in order to prevent an interplanetary war” appeals to you, this book is probably for you.

That summary, however, does not do the story complete justice. Winter’s Orbit represents what I like best about the genre:

☑ an extraordinarily imaginative world with varied forces forming a tremulous web of fraught coexistence
☑ complicated political machinations
☑ that racy adventurous feel of a mystery left unsolved
☑ deftly rendered characters that drive straight to your heart
☑ an ineffably tender romance with high stakes

All of it woven through a superbly assured prose to create the kind of storytelling that wells up to pull you into a thrilling reading experience. Winter’s Orbit also has several rewarding emotional layers. To talk about them, I'll have to spoil a few things about the story. So, spoilers ahead!

***
Jainan’s chapters are absolutely painful to read. From the outset, Jainan carries himself with the flinching weariness of a man with memories that require iron cages, kept still and captive so they do not devour him whole. This comes with a sense of foreboding, a whisper of wrongness. We do not immediately understand why Jainan moves so timidly through the narrative, always guarded, always careful, like he is waiting for a blow. Why he often has to realign his whole world around a single act of kindness. Why everything he thinks and does tends towards an all-pervasive self-loathing. Most chilling is the sense that Jainan’s private, repeated mantras carry the echo of someone else’s voice. 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, used his position as an imperial prince to etch the knowledge of powerlessness directly into Jainan’s mind, 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.

Through Jainan’s character, the novel 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. It’s a devastating topic, but the author handles it with so much care. 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 casts a vast, horrible shadow over your relationships and leaves you unmoored. 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.

Prince Kiem offers a really good counterpart to Jainan's character. Prince Kiem has carefully constructed his reputation as the evanescently charming, scandal-prone prince who leads an unfettered life, the way one might erect a brick façade or drape armor around their body. One of the novel’s most rewarding moments is seeing Kiem with his defenses lowered, his shields abandoned on the ground, all the barricades abraded. Behind the charming façade is someone who is insecure and self-effacing, so tragically concerned with other people’s unfavorable opinions of him, so lonely and so desperate not to be. Someone who can also be naive sometimes: by his own admission, Prince Kiem did not care for the intricacies of war and politics and did his best to banish from his thoughts all of the Empire and its tumultuous affairs. Slowly lifting the fog of complacency and ignorance around Kiem, the novel forces him to confront several uncomfortable truths, and when it does, Kiem throws himself headlong into unearthing the secrets lodged under the Empire’s skin, holding them into the light and calling for wrongs to be set aright. All of it in a beautiful display of character-development.

Obviously, Jainan and Kiem cannot be any more different. Where Kiem is loud and chaotic and draws all eyes like a flare, Jainan is a world unto himself, with a shadow’s talent for passing unremarked. For long stretches of the novel, both Jainan and Kiem keep an invisible barbed wire between them. I loved how Kiem fell in love with Jainan in one swift motion, clear and unmistakable, and how slowly he eased open Jainan’s heart like a book, mindful of the places, still tender and aching, where the past left its bruises. I loved how Jainan stood firmly by Kiem’s side, slowly learning to let go and trust that Kiem’s embrace will break his fall. This novel is about the yearning, honey. The will-they-won’t-they back and forth drove me to the brink of INSANITY, and I wanted to scream at both of them to “PLEASE JUST KISS”.

All in all, Winter’s Orbit is a smart, tender, and deeply rewarding gem of space opera. I could have gladly spent twice as long with Jainan and Kiem, and still longed for more by the end.