FORMAT/INFO: What Fury Brings will be published by Fiewel Books on September 23rd, 2025. It is 368 pages and available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: In a kingdom where most of the noblemen were killed in an uprising several years ago, it’s become common practice for royalty to kidnap husbands from neighboring kingdoms. Princess Olera is one such royal member. To secure her position in line to the throne, she needs to prove she can tame a proper husband. She’s decided the meek poet prince of a neighboring kingdom is an ideal candidate. But a drunken prank sees the prince swapping places with his brother, and Olera unknowingly ends up with warrior prince Sanos instead. Sanos has to hide his identity long enough to escape - but the more he gets to know his bride-to-be, the less he’s sure of what he wants.

What Fury Brings is a bit of a muddled romantasy, caught between trying to be a sultry romance and an exploration of gender dynamics. The author is very clear with her intent on writing this book, starting with the author's note where she bluntly states she's taken cis men and women's normal gender roles and reversed them, so that men are the ones who are supposed to be seen and not heard, look beautiful for their spouse, treated as weak soft things that exist to pleasure the opposite gender. While the female-led kingdom of Amarra is more progressive about sex and gender identities than its neighboring male-led countries, it is not free from cruelty, exploitation, or slavery. Olera vows to make changes to her kingdom to do away with much of this - a fact she tells to the man she literally kidnapped to further her political ambitions.

This premise is definitely targeted at those who like a dominant/submissive relationship, and requires you to be onboard with a kidnapping trope. Female main character Olera is clear that she will not force herself on male lead Sanos, but the fact remains that he spends much of the book imprisoned and in chains until he decides he’s fine to marry this woman. If you find that off-putting, bounce along to the next book. For me, I came fully on board and ready to see what the author did with the premise.

As for the spice, I found it often more explicit than sexy. On the one hand, there’s a freshness to the frank and direct discussion of sex and bodies to be found in this book. The matriarchal society Olera belongs to strips much of the mystique away from sex, a fact which Sanos finds unnerving in his more closeted society. On the other hand, that also meant that the descriptions felt more clinical than seductive. It's perhaps why I felt cold on the romance, not truly feeling the spark that's supposed to be growing between the two characters.

What Fury Brings is a book that leaves me perplexed with what to do with it. It is a sledgehammer of commentary by saying "Hey, by reversing normal gender roles, can't we see how terrible this situation is?" It is also using those reversed roles to unabashedly lean into dominant/submissive kink. It both uses the power imbalance to titillate the audience, while also lecturing that the power imbalance is bad. In short, it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Which just leaves me with a bit of whiplash: am I supposed to find this arousing or offputting?

CONCLUSION: There's no denying that What Fury Brings is bingeable candy, a story of light court politics and intrigue that you can read in fairly short order. But What Fury Brings also has aspirations of being more than that, and in dealing with weightier themes, the story stumbles. What I came to realize is that just because the societal gender power imbalances are reversed does not mean I now suddenly enjoy the societal power imbalances. I'd rather read a fantasy story without the imbalance at all. Maybe if this had been a story that put the genders on equal footing and then found the pleasure in an imbalance, I would have liked it more. I fully understand the drive that caused the author to write this story, but at the end of the day it just didn't work as a romance for me.