Road to Ruin

I'm of two minds of this one.

Surface stuff first: there's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, magitech, fantasy stuff in a vaguely sci-fi world. There's characters who are likeable, if occasionally a bit tedious in their sense of worthlessness. But the main event is a love triangle.

Road to Ruin reads like fanfiction of itself, if such a thing is possible. And yet, this is not a bad thing. My general feeling about fanfic is that it's intended to give its readers what they cannot have in canon. This is not condemnation, nor do I claim to know much about fanfic, but the few times I read it, that is my reason. What basically no stories outside of fanfic ever gives me as a reader is poly romance (there's a couple of exceptions - Sense8 and the Fans webcomic come to mind).

A sister trope to Bury Your Gays is killing the third wheel, making sure that the alpha couple get their happy ending, and the one messing up the matters dies conveniently. Reading Road to Ruin poly-baited me all the way to the end, until ... well, it didn't kill the third wheel, but it didn't quite give me the sappy three-person romantic happy ending I'd been craving.

A happy ending for non-straight, non mono-folk is important because of representation. I want to see poly romance in fiction, and not just as tragedy. Sure there's polycules -- established polycules -- in the background in a lot of stories, like the Expanse, but they are like gay background charcters in the nineties, just there for colour. I want to read about the journey and the experience.

Road to Ruin almost goes there. It quite doesn't, and I kind of hate it for it. Do not polybait me, Hana Lee! Then again, this might be because the journey is still ongoing. Maybe it's not supposed to be a piece of feel-good indulgence, maybe it's supposed to be the start of a long story. I'm choosing to believe this and rating the book accordingly. If it turns out I'm wrong, I'll be returning with furious judgement.