Review: A Tangled Legacy by Mickie B. Ashling

Title: A Tangled Legacy

Author: Mickie B. Ashling

Length: 279 Pages

Category: Fantasy

At a Glance: If you like young, brash men, coolly arrogant and logical men, some magic, penetrative sex being the symbolic consummation of love, and fairy-tale love/tragedy, this one’s for you.

Reviewed By: Jovan

Blurb: Prince Colin of Sendorra would have been the spare instead of the heir if fate hadn’t intervened. Like his father and forefathers, Colin is expected to marry and father a child or his principality reverts to Spain at the time of his death. Filling the royal nursery with healthy babies seems easy enough until Princess Charlotte—his childhood friend and intended bride—breaks off their engagement.

Nobel Prize winner—and powerful gray witch—Alain de Gris isn’t looking for love. Science and research have taken center stage for years until he walks into a club and lays eyes on Colin, thirteen years his junior.

Bisexual by nature, Colin seeks to avoid another engagement repeat by shying away from a same-sex relationship. There are no acceptable alternatives to provide legitimate offspring if he follows his heart.

But Colin can’t stay away from Alain and the witch finds him irresistible. Ignoring the absolutes isn’t easy when a legacy is in jeopardy. And while magic may offer a solution, it could also create more problems.

Review: Having found the blend of fairy tale and modern aspects in Mickie B. Ashling’s short story Once Upon a Mattress to be fun and charming, I was excited to read A Tangled Legacy in the hopes of learning more about this world and its inhabitants in a full-length story. Unfortunately, I think 1.) my personal expectations were too high, and 2.) being a fan of paranormal/fantasy, I pay attention to and place a lot of importance on worldbuilding, and the lack of a solid foundation for a world can really inhibit my enjoyment, and 3.) Colin just rubbed me the wrong way and never grew or redeemed himself in my eyes.

From the characters to the worldbuilding, most of the elements felt a bit superficial and one-dimensional to me. Having POV shifts for every character should be a tool that gives them more depth, personality, development, etc., and if the POV shifts of secondary characters don’t do this, then they just seem unnecessary. For me, it’s a bit of a problem when the most interesting/fleshed out character is the bad-guy, and by “fleshed-out” I mean he’s a sociopath whose primary motivation is to rise above his humble beginnings and achieve power and status. Most of the characters, including the MCs, come across as a bit too arrogant and selfish to be more than tolerable. While Ashling probably wanted to portray Colin as a more sympathetic character, a young man struggling to come to terms with the responsibility he would not have if his older twin brother, Andrew, had survived, and wanting to have a bit more freedom to explore life outside of the constraints of constant scrutiny, he, unfortunately, comes across mostly as entitled, whiny, and dangerously impulsive.

Colin exemplifies one of the traits I find most irritating with many YA characters: he’s constantly shouting (literally) that he’s an adult and should be treated as such, yet fails to act like one or accept responsibility when his childish behavior or recklessness is called into question. One example (of many) is when his private security reports back to his fathers that Colin gave Alain a BJ in a public sauna. Colin fumes about the lack of privacy (overlooking the fact that he was lucky it was his men and not paparazzi who saw him), defends his actions because [they were horny], and ends the convo calling his fathers meddling jerks. Had there been more than one line in the book stating that Colin was “so fucking tired of being levelheaded and responsible” and any other indicators to see his responsible, levelheaded side to counteract him constantly slipping away from his guards (who are at risk for getting fired), acting rashly and blowing up at people when they question him or he doesn’t get his way, then he may not have seemed so much like an entitled brat.

Alain was the more likeable MC simply because his arrogance wasn’t just from family legacy and was more earned; moreover, he was a calming, logical reprieve from Colin’s impetuousness and almost constant complaining about something. Colin’s family doesn’t fare much better on the likeability scale either. Colin’s grandmother, the Dowager Princess Alexandra, is as self-absorbed and inflexible in wanting her own way as her grandson, and even Errol and Bash’s inclusion does them a disservice. For while they love their son, the major plotline, along with other occurrences, painfully illustrate how out of touch they are with Colin, how little they know about him and how close they aren’t. To be fair to his parents, though, Colin isn’t particularly forthcoming, and is (IMO) so engrossed by bemoaning and resenting his fate as the heir of the kingdom that he shuts them out and doesn’t use the primary resource for dealing with it—his father, Bash. Bash was also the sole heir, groomed to rule the kingdom and under pressure to reproduce, so if anyone would understand and be able to talk to Colin about it, it would be him. Instead, all you really get from Colin as a character is that he hates his responsibility and wishes Andrew hadn’t died so he could be the “spare” like he should have been. While there is some survivor’s guilt, whenever he talks about his dead brother, it’s in the context of how “it would have been so much easier if [Andrew had] lived”.

A Tangled Legacy takes place in world very similar to our own, with Sendorra, the kingdom Colin’s family rules, being a former principality of Spain, but the similarity became a detriment to the story. There were too many questions about the world for me to stay engaged, particularly since there was nothing really compelling about either MC. Magic exists, but its description and complexity are not really consistent throughout the book. For example, when Alain mentions he has been learning magic since he was a toddler, Colin asks how he didn’t do something like set the house on fire, and Alain basically replies that it isn’t that simple. Yet, Alain is seen starting fires, cleaning up messes, etc., with a flick of the wrist and only using incantations with major magical feats. Apparently, the world also has vampires and demons that can come instantly to a ghost’s aid. Additionally, male pregnancy in genetically intersex males (no transgender pregnancies, it seems) are a common enough occurrence that no one questions it, but Colin still deems it “unnatural” even though he is a product of it. The book also gives the impression that females in this world do not die in childbirth or have stillborn babies, because the way the characters talk about it, it seems like male pregnancy is the only one that can end in death. Given that there are approximately twenty-four-thousand stillbirths and over three-hundred-thousand childbirth deaths annually, this emphasis on the dangers of male childbirth only is notable. These elements may seem nitpicky, but when writing fantasy/PNR, one of the pitfalls of using a setting that is our world, with only a few magical tweaks, is that it’s much easier for the reader to be distracted by questions that may have gone unremarked on in a purely fantasy realm because of their real-world counterparts.

However, the book does stay true to its fairy-tale roots with 1.) Alain and Colin progressing quickly from locking eyes across a crowded room to falling in love, 2.) the lovers being willing to make a deal to be together, and 3.) learning the hard lesson that comes for trading your voice/soul/firstborn/etc., for love—that the cost for wishing on a star can be tragic. So, if you like young, brash men, coolly arrogant and logical men, some magic, penetrative sex being the symbolic consummation of love, and fairy-tale love/tragedy, this one’s for you.

You can buy A Tangled Legacy here:
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