Galilee Kincaid has spent her whole life on her family’s property on the outskirts of the city of Salvation. Led by her strong-willed grandmother, the Kincaid women protect the cityfolk by hunting down evil and dispatching it. Several of the women have uncanny abilities, but Gali is different enough that the others keep their distance. When she finally leaves home, she wants a normal, simple life. She gets an apartment in Salvation and two friends, Bonbon and Oriakụ, and for a while everything is coming up Galilee. Then she meets Lucifer, aka the King of Hell.
Pretending to be a private security consultant, Lucifer and several of his Princes of Hell were hired by Oriakụ’s father to guard a priceless artifact. The humans don’t realize the object is actually a dangerous object that could ultimately destroy everything Galilee holds dear. Unfortunately for Lucifer, Galilee is an extremely tempting distraction. And unfortunately for Leviathan, one of the Princes of Hell, he also can’t keep his eyes off her. Do they want to kill her or kiss her? Probably both. As Luci and Gali paw at each other, an unknown antagonist skulks in the shadows, pushing the love triangle to its breaking point and threatening innocent humans. Loyalties are broken, alliances are forged, and lust is sated, but will our lovers be able to save the world without losing each other?
The insta-love trope has many fans in romance readers. I, however, am not one of them. The idea that anyone could be so overcome by hormones that they fall in love with someone they barely know seems completely unrealistic and illogical to me, but that may just be my asexuality and aromanticism talking. What frustrates me about insta-love, besides shortcutting the emotional labor that comes with developing a new relationship—the very part I find most interesting in romance fiction—is that it often requires one or both love interests to be naive or willing to disregard blatantly obvious truths. Both happen in this book quite a bit.
Dark romance is also a category I don’t typically dip into. The relationship dynamics aren’t something I usually enjoy. I prefer my love interests to be kind to each other more than darkly seductive and manipulative. This novel isn’t fully dark romance, but it dips its toes into those tumultuous waters more than a few times. I knew going in that this book had insta-love and dark romance elements, so I approached reading it like a “dead dove, do not eat” situation. (For those who aren’t familiar, that is a tag I believe originated on Archive Of Our Own but references a bit from the TV show Arrested Development; it basically means what is in the tags is what is in the fic so don’t act surprised when you ignore the tags and end up reading something you don’t like or want.) The book is what it is, and I decided to read it anyway. My job as a critic is not to complain about specific tropes and subgenres I personally don’t like but to think about how the author uses those tropes and subgenres, how those they impact my experience as a reader, the larger social and historical contexts of those tropes in literature, and how they impact the structure and narrative of the work.
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Son of the Morning
So, within the confines of insta-love and dark romance, how does Son of the Morning fare? Pretty well! I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, given what a literary powerhouse Emezi is. Going back to those earlier examples of insta-love willful ignorance, Emezi doesn’t just do the trope. They are interested in exploring why it happens and what the ramifications are. The love interests are also somewhat aware they’re in these tropes and peel back the layers in intriguing ways. I hate it when reviewers say a work of genre fiction has been “elevated” into “real literature.” It invalidates and demeans genre fiction, as if simply because its genre it cannot be “good.” I don’t think Son of the Morning is trying to elevate romantasy, anyway. It is what it says on the tin and it engages with the foundational romantasy tropes in thoughtful ways that most romantasy novels never bother with.
One thing I find frustrating about the current romantasy trend, in both adult and young adult fiction categories, is how cisallohet it is. Don’t even get me started on how the underlying themes of a lot of these books are fascism-adjacent and tradwife-coded. Emezi doesn’t fall into that trap. It’s not only that the sexual and romantic attraction between the three points in the love triangle is queer, but the tropes themselves are queered. Emezi shifts the way the tropes play out as they filter them through the lens of queerness. Structurally, the weak spots are everyone other than the love triangle. We see so little of the others and they get so little character development that they fall flat on the page. In particular, Gali’s human friends might as well not exist, they have so little impact or input on the story. To me it felt like a wasted opportunity to engage in the queer found family trope. Having Gali rely on her community more instead of the entire plot resting solely on her shoulders would have not only given the story more depth but also added more emotional weight to the queer romance.
At the end of the day, Akwaeke Emezi’s Son of the Morning is well-written, high heat, queer romantasy with explicit sex scenes and a grab bag of tropes. If you like those things, you’ll probably like this. I, for one, had a great time reading this. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, as a fan of both fantasy and romance fiction. I wish I’d read this with a friend so we could’ve debriefed after every chapter.
Son of the Morning is published by Avon.
Read an excerpt.
