In this post: a review of A River of Golden Bones by A.K. Mulford; moving off Substack to WordPress; ongoing efforts to Plan What I’m Talking About.
A.K. Mulford, A River of Golden Bones. New York: HarperCollins. 2023.
I’d never encountered A.K. Mulford’s work before picking up A River of Golden Bones for review, though a little research reveals that they’re a TikTok personality who has previously published a series of novels which began in self-published form before Harper Voyager acquired world English rights.
A River of Golden Bones is the perfect storm of things that, while in themselves may be generally unobjectionable or in theory even interesting, in this particular form are not for me. Sleeping Beauty, werewolves, fated soulmates, and more focus on romance and sex than worldbuilding and intrigue: this novel is like six different fanfic tropes climbed out of the ether and collided with a rough burning kiss as their mouths crashed together.
I say this with neither particular praise nor particular criticism for fanfiction as a mode of fiction. It has its own conventions and particular forms of storytelling, its own conversations and sense of genre. Its cross-pollination with the forms and conventions of “original” fiction, particularly in the realm of science fiction and fantasy — or perhaps I should say the fertile spread of its conventions and tropes into the realm of original fiction — is a rather fascinating phenomenon, and one that speaks to a democratisation in the culture of long-form fiction. What makes A River of Golden Bones likely to appeal to a wide audience are those traits that it shares with both fanfiction and genre romance (another very popular field): its failings, for a reader who prefers more fantasy in their romantic fantasy, are failings that it shares with a great preponderance of works in these fields, and viewed solely in terms of the genre conventions and expectations of those fields, are not not necessarily failings at all.
In the world of A River of Golden Bones, Wolves — shapeshifters who can move between human and wolf forms at will — rule all the kingdoms. Wolf society is patriarchal and patrilineal. Humans live separately from Wolves, are physically weaker, and heal more slowly, but have — apparently — a more egalitarian approach to society (across all the kingdoms) than their overlords, and more genders than the Wolves’ binary of male and female.
Calla and Briar are twin sisters. They are the last heirs of the Gold Wolf rulers of the kingdom of Olmdere. When they were born, the dark sorceress Sawyn killed their parents and took over their kingdom. Their lives were saved by the faery Vellia, who came in response to their mother’s last wish, and who has raised them in the forest far from any others. Only a handful of people know Briar survived: she has been raised to fulfil the betrothal arranged before her birth and marry Grae, heir to King Nero, joining their kingdoms (and, theoretically, gaining an ally to overthrow Sawyn). Calla has been raised in Briar’s shadow, educated to be her protector. No one know she’s Briar’s twin except for Nero and Grae himself — who visited her when they were all still children and became her friend.
The betrothal between Briar and Grae is on the cusp of being fulfilled when Calla learns that Nero never meant to help them recover Olmdere, but only use Briar to legitimate his claim to Olmdere’s mines. Then, before the wedding can be completed, Briar and Calla both publicly discover they have soulmates, an unusual and unexpected development. Briar’s is a distant female royal relative called Maez. But Calla’s… is Grae. Worse, Sawyn shows up, kidnaps Maez, and curses Briar into an enchanted sleep. Calla, still an unknown, escapes Sawyn’s focus — but now Nero means to have her wed Grae while doing nothing for either her sister or her country.
Calla’s not willing to stand for that. She’ll rescue Briar’s soulmate on her own if she has to, and overthrow Sawyn on her own as well, for good measure. She flees Nero’s court and falls in with a band of travelling (human) entertainers headed for Olmdere, where Sawyn is hosting a celebration to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her victory. Grae defies his father to follow, along with his two best friends/personal guards. They will face Sawyn together and triumph. Along the way, Calla discovers that their gender identity better matches one of the nonbinary human ones than the Wolves’ one that they were assigned at birth.
As fated soulmates, Calla and Grae are extremely attracted to each other. Once they overcome a small matter of miscommunication about Grae’s loyalties and his intentions, they have lots of sex. Lots of sex. (Including sex at moments that makes the reader strongly question their judgment.) The sex is never awkward or unsatisfying, and neither partner needs to talk very much at all about what they want (except in what’s, I suppose, meant to be erotic dirty talk), and it is described in thorough, albeit somewhat clichéd terms. Unfortunately, from my point of view, there’s no real frisson of feeling to the sex scenes and no real character in them either: a lot of frenzy and burning and sliding and thrusting, screaming and grunting and mewling (a word I would generally prefer not to encounter in a sexual context) and orgasms galore, but not much in the way of erotic charge. It feels perfunctory and mechanical: the sex scenes carry no narrative or emotional weight besides the titillatory. In consequence, if you fail to find them titillating, you’re liable to find them tedious.
The action scenes, too, seem to serve largely mechanical purposes. They have little relationship to the characters’ emotional development, while on a practical (logical, strategic) level, everyone in this novel — the most villainous villains and the very heroic heroes alike — makes some rather baffling choices about who to confront, when, with what allies and to what purpose. The action scenes exist so that the reader can be assured that Calla is badass and Grae is badass and hot, or so it seems: I cannot quite bring myself to believe in their stakes. And the criticism of patriarchy, sexism and discrimination that the novel contains is, from my point of view, too shallow to even count as a thematic argument.
A River of Golden Bones is told in the first person perspective, from Calla’s point of view, and Calla’s personal journey of discovering that they’re not exactly the woman they always thought they were is the most compelling element of the entire novel. I didn’t expect the boyfriend:everything else ratio to skew quite so hard to the boyfriend end of the scale, though, for all that it’s marketed as the new breed of fantasy romance. I read this shortly after T. Kingfisher’s most recent fantasy romance, Paladin‘s Faith, and I can conclude that it’s not that I don’t enjoy romantic storylines in my fantasy, but that I prefer them a) weirder and b) having more complicated plot events around which the romance and characters can grow, encounter obstacles, and change than A River of Golden Bones provides.
If you enjoy reading about young people discovering new things about themselves while killing their enemies and having a lot of sex with their soulmate, you may enjoy A River of Golden Bones. Let me know what you think of it if so: I’m interested to hear what people with a greater preference for romance have to say about it.
Administrivia:
You may or not be aware that I was running a Substack newsletter. After Substack’s management basically doubled down on being the kind of people who want outright N*zis and white supremacists to make money, I’m moving my all the stuff that used to be on Substack over here, as the most cost-effective option. This doesn’t effect anything here, except that I’m going to be numbering my posts (started doing that on Substack, realised I liked it) and that sometimes, something might be behind a subscription paywall.
Very little of my writing is behind a paywall, even at Patreon (where you can support my efforts to write more about history and history books, as well as science fiction and fantasy), so not much should change at all.
Between one thing and another1, I didn’t post at all in December and January about my ongoing personal research project on captivity in antiquity. The first excited flurry of READ ALL THE THINGS has calmed down, leaving me with a few options to work through for how to direct my attention. I’ll report back when I feel that there’s something else to say.
And most nonfiction reading came, in fact, to a bit of a standstill in all the hectic urgency of the months in question. It should pick up again a bit now, so I’ll be reporting in on that. (Some helpful folks on Bluesky gave me some pointers for things to read on Japanese history, since I have a curiosity at the moment.)
That’s it from me for now.
- Honestly, it’s because I had no idea what December could be like with a small child discovering the joy of presents and Exciting Events in tow. And it turns out that it is intense. ↩︎
κῆπος τῶν βιβλιοθηκῶν | a garden from the libraries 