“Danger was the thrilling price of power. Nohra was a double-edged blade with no hilt. He’d be shredding his own hands to cut down their enemies.”
All I knew about The Gryphon King before going in was that it was promised to have (queer) sword-wielding female knights on winged, man-eating horses, and that was honestly enough to know I needed this in my life. Turns out, that is only one of the many (many!) aspects that make this dark, epic, political fantasy so wonderfully intriguing and breathtakingly brilliant. In a way, it reminds me of a mash-up of all the best elements of She Who Became the Sun, The Priory of the Orange Tree, and The City of Brass, except it’s also completely its own thing and truly unlike anything I have ever read.
We are transported into a vast, complex and masterfully crafted (queer-normative!!) fantasy world inspired by Turkic/Kurdish cultures that is as beautiful as it is brutal. And then it’s got all the most morally gray characters who you can love to hate and hate to love, cutthroat political intrigue and military scheming, all kinds of mythical monsters like gryphons, sea horses, pegasi, ghouls, and djinn roaming (or terrorizing) the lands, a deadly blood disease with a mysterious effect on the spirit, and just the most delicious dash of sloooow-burn queer romance that had my heart beating overtime; I know, almost sounds too good to be true, but I promise you it’s not!
Now, the early chapters of The Gryphon King felt a bit disjointed to me due to a few timeskips, the overwhelming depth of the history and complexities of the tense political landscape, and the heavy focus on action, but the intrigue factor just had me turning pages like crazy anyway. And then, around the 25% mark, I really found my footing as all the pieces started to click into place, and I was completely hooked from there on out.
Both my scarred and dangerously ambitious Bataar and my hot-headed, cunning warrior princess Nohra were just fantastic characters to follow (even if I sometimes wanted to strangle them for their actions), and I loved seeing the development of their dangerous dynamic as their paths grew ever more inextricably intertwined over the course of the story. Sometimes I found it a bit hard to really understand their emotions, motivations and actions, but instead of it feeling like weak character work, it almost felt like that was intentional; they are just so realistically flawed and frustratingly human, and we all know that human emotions do not make logical sense all the time.
Some of the side cast did admittedly pale a bit in comparison to these two powerhouse main characters (especially since we’re dealing with so many players on the board), but there were a few side characters who absolutely stole my heart. For me, my bisexual queen Qaira was the biggest highlight, and I ate up every scene that she was in, be that with her family with Bataar or with our lovely chaos queer Nohra (hello sapphic tensionnnnn!!). But then Darya, Tarken and a lot of the badass Harpy Knights also really got their time to shine, and I loved digging into all the complicated and beautifully complicated relationships at the core of this story, be they platonic, rivalrous, friendly, familial, romantic, or something altogether more confusing in between it all.
It was exactly the deadly schemes and dangerous games that these characters were playing with each other that kept me fully engaged, even in moments where the (military) action was a bit too intense for my personal tastes. See, as skilled as Omer is at writing pulse-pounding battle scenes or deadly monster attacks, I personally think all the more quiet moments when characters are fighting silent battles in their own minds or are wielding their words as weapons against each other are the absolute standout scenes in The Gryphon King, and I would have loved to see more of those to create an even deeper emotional connection and investment.
Ultimately, The Gryphon King was just an absolute rollercoaster of a story that excited, delighted and freaked me the hell out with each new turn of the page, and I can’t wait to see what Omer has in store in the rest of The Chaos Constallation; I’ll bet it’s going to be chaos, and I am SO ready for it. If this debut is anything to go off of, then I have no doubts that Omer is going to be an author to watch. What a wild ride, highly recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley and Titan Books for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. The Gryphon King is scheduled for release on July 8, 2025
