“ ‘I will wear black,’ I confirm. This small act will be noted by all. Wearing black on a day when all should wear red is a statement of the very opposite. It doesn’t signify new life or a promise, it signifies an end and a threat. Queen Cecily will be confused by it, but it isn’t intended for her. It’s for Lady Alice of the House of Fish, and she’ll perceive it straight away.”

If you like Tudor-era courtly intrigue where every social misstep can have devastating consequences, then The Throne of Ash is for you. Set in a world like Tudor England but where society is intensely matriarchal and misandric, this book follows Princess Bess as she navigates love (both familial and romantic), and duty. When her promised partner becomes the royal consort of her sister the queen, Bess ends up in the middle of a series of events that nobody could have predicted.

The premise of The Throne of Ash is really awesome. I love the idea of a Tudor-style world where the women are in charge instead of just being playing pieces to be passed around by the men in the story (or in history). The women in this book are powerful and ruthless and mostly amoral, and generally quite fun to follow because of that. Their status is for them the most important thing, and everything else is secondary, and I love getting to see that. Bess’s PoV is really thoroughly embedded in the world; she is just as guilty of bigotry as everyone around her and the book doesn’t flinch away from that or how uncomfortable it is. In many ways, she’s a traditional type of character for a book like this; not interested in intrigue or social politics and wanting to retire from her princessly duties as soon as possible, but it never comes off in a “not like other girls” sort of way, which I really appreciate. The other characters are quite interesting as well, and I particularly liked Queen Cecily, Bess’s sister, who has her own set of restrictions and duties and affections to navigate.

Unfortunately, I find that the one-to-one misogyny-misandry flip that we see in the worldbuilding here is quite hit and miss. There are a lot of (intentionally and successfully) uncomfortable scenes where men, including teenage boys, are sexually objectified in a way that mirrors the ways that women and girls are sexually objectified both now and in the Tudor era, which is very effective in getting the point across to the reader. But in a lot of cases I find the nature of that objectification doesn’t really make sense in this world of inverted gender roles. We end up with convoluted storylines about people not really being the child of the mother who claims to be their mother, which always needs a complex explanation for obvious reasons, but we also see what are, in the real world at least, clear artefacts of misogyny such as women wearing intense corsetry, a focus on female virginity, and fears about heredity, none of which really make sense in this culture.

There is also quite a lot of repetition and narrative wandering throughout this; Bess will often interrupt herself to start thinking about the backstory, and then go back to the present, and then look around and describe the people around her for a while, and then finally return her focus to whatever is happening just in time for the reader to have forgotten what it was. Events and actions are described in a fairly repetitive way that sometimes made it hard for me to focus on what was happening, and information about characters and settings, especially in the first half of the book, is often given to us in long expository sections that sometimes talk about several characters all at once. There are quite a few instances of sentence-level confusion where the wording makes it unclear to me what exactly is happening as well, all of which really hindered my reading.

Elements of the ending hit fairly hard in a way that left me feeling a little uncomfortable and also, in my opinion, left some of the messaging of the book kind of foggy. It isn’t ultimately my cup of high tea, but I do think that The Throne of Ash has an audience in those longing for a more feminist take on Tudor style social interactions with a dash of quiet family drama.