A First Look At ‘An Alliance of Ash and Jade’
Photo by Daniela Denyer Malo
If you're in a reading slump and want something to pull you out of it, this is a strong pick. It's a closed-door romance with an enemies-to-lovers arc that actually earns the label (more on that later), set inside a fantasy’s political competition for an empire's throne. If soft, cute, low-heat romantic fantasy is your genre, this delivers.
The setup is a competition for succession with trials, tests, strategic marriages, and alliances forged outside of marriage too. The emperor doesn't die to trigger the games; instead, a magic pearl determines when the empire needs a new ruler, which is a nice structural swerve on the usual "dead king" fantasy trope, and it means the sitting emperor stays present in the story as an advisor rather than being written out.
To me, worldbuilding is where the book earns its stars. The world draws on a genuinely varied mix of cultural inspirations, and it's legible - you can tell, character by character, what culture their family and traditions are drawing from. One of the main families is clearly Scottish (the audiobook even gives them distinct accents) and as someone who loves Scotland and visits often, I loved this. Another main character reads as inspired by Chinese culture, and the same care shows across the wider cast of characters: specific foods, specific traditions, specific things each character enjoys. It doesn't feel like set dressing. It feels like a world someone actually built and completely thought through before they started writing characters into it.
I did, however, have an issue with the book. The female lead is set up as smart and strong, and one of her central arcs is that she's been conditioned to believe her only value is her usefulness to the men around her. The book explicitly names this. It just never does anything about it.
She works her way out of that belief almost entirely internally and through no real show of her value - there's no one and nothing in the plot that actively challenges it or gives her another source of worth. The male lead does show her love for who she is, not what she does for him, which is something. But by the end, everyone around her still only values her for what she does for them: help securing the throne, helping her family, being a good wife. She isn't given an actual role, a life, or a single thing she enjoys outside of being useful to other people. The book tells you she matters, but the plot shows you she doesn't.
Maybe this resolves in a sequel. If this is book one of a series and she gets an arc of her own later, fine, I'll reserve my judgment. But if it's a standalone, or if future books don't fix this, it's a real structural problem: you can't argue a woman's worth isn't just her usefulness while never giving her anything else to be.
However, I do complain a lot about books that call themselves enemies-to-lovers but never actually give you the "enemies" part and this one delivers. You feel real hostility and hatred between the two leads at the start, and you watch it earn its way into friendship and then love. The dialogue is sharp, the pacing is fast enough to keep you hooked but slow enough to enjoy the burn, and the tension never feels manufactured through cheap dialogue, but rather naturally interesting.
There is genuinely great worldbuilding and one of the better enemies-to-lovers executions I've read recently in this book, only undercut by a heroine the plot doesn't actually believe in.
Until the next page!
Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor
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