The Empress

• Author: Kristin Cast
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: January 7, 2025
• Publisher: Bloom Books
• Series: Towerfall #1

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloom Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

He’s a ruthless, battle-scarred warrior with a dark past, and she’s stuck pretending to be his wife to save a fantasy kingdom.

From New York Times bestselling author Kristin Cast comes a new tarot-inspired fantasy series. Scarlett St. Clair meets Outlander in the seductive and spellbinding world of Towerfall, starting with The Empress, a high-heat, fake marriage romantasy with a swoon-worthy, morally-gray love interest.

The Arcana aren’t just figures in a tarot deck―they’re real. Terrifyingly real. That’s what I learned when I found a tarot card in the snow and was yanked from my world and into Towerfall. The first thing the people of this harsh, cruel realm did was try to kill me, and they probably would have succeeded if Kane hadn’t taken me to his hideout in the woods and nursed me back to health.

But I don’t know if I can trust him. He’s too hot to be good news, he’s definitely hiding secrets, and I’ve already seen him kill two people to protect me. If I hadn’t just been helplessly dumped into his world, the scars on his hands and his dark, brooding attitude would have me running in the opposite direction.

But right now, convincing the Kingdom of Pentacles that Kane and I are married is my best chance of getting into the palace, and back to my own world.

Because there’s something wrong with Towerfall. Something deeply, terrifyingly wrong. And if anyone finds out Kane and I aren’t really married?

Well, then both of us are dead.

I had never read anything by this author, and didn’t know much about her at all. All that I really did know was that she recently put out a book co-written with one of my favorite romantasy authors. So I had my standards set pretty high, and got set straight early on. There were many things that I did like about the book, but there were also some things I didn’t love. 

To start with, the positives and negatives of this book came in pairs. So rather than discussing the positives and negatives separately, I’m going to not separate them out. There were some Outlander vibes, especially in the beginning.

This book takes place in two settings—one in the modern-day urban setting, and the other in the tarot-inspired world of Towerfall. The story starts out in Chicago, where we discover that Hannah works for a marketing company and has some significant issues. She’s broke, despite working at a thriving company where her coworkers in the same position seem to have enough money to go out, while Hannah is just barely squeaking by, has no car, and relies on unreliable public transportation to get around, even in the freezing winter temps. I found myself wondering if she’s bad at budgeting, yet still empathizing with her. The setting of Towerfall is a whole different issue. Once she gets transported to this mysterious, dangerous, and magickal world, she seems to think it will be an opportunity for her to reinvent herself. Yet all of her flaws come to the surface really quickly, and it is a great example of how moving locations doesn’t change who you are as Hannah really struggles to work through her issues.

I was most looking forward to seeing world building relying on inspiration from tarot cards, and was probably most disappointed by this aspect of the story. While the characters represent both the Kingdom of Cups and the Kingdom of Pentacles, there isn’t a heavy emphasis on tarot as I was hoping for. Instead, there were a handful of nods towards tarot cards and their meanings, rather than a fully-realized world. Despite our character spending the majority of the story in Towerfall, the world building came slowly. Readers learn only what Hannah learns while she’s there, yet she doesn’t seem very focused on anything outside of getting back to her world, where nothing is waiting for her except work. And as we learn quickly, her work isn’t going very well.

Another thing I struggled with was Hannah herself. At first, I could empathize with where she is in life, because we’ve all felt stuck at some point. But rather than creating a fully-fleshed out character, her personality felt as though it was made up of sexual urges and constant negative self-talk, which got old fast. She puts herself down at every opportunity, always talking about her ‘frizzy hair,’ ‘slight curves,’ and how she consistently makes the decisions that blow up in her face. Yet she gets in her own way every chance she gets and doesn’t show a lot of change over the story. Spoiler alert: the only way she’s able to feign confidence is after an extreme makeover. Kane never felt fully realized to me—I’m a very visual reader, yet I struggled to even picture Kane, outside of his golden skin, black hair, and oozing sexuality. Unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of personality from him.

The banter between Kane and Hannah was one of the high notes in the book, as they have some really great interactions. Fake dating/marriage is one of my favorite tropes, but Cast fell short on the relationship development—our characters go from fighting insta-lust to just going with it, and it didn’t feel natural or believable, since they never bother to get to know each other beyond the basics, so I wasn’t fully behind the pairing. As far as the spice, this is a high-heat story with wonderfully written scenes of our characters hooking up. I can’t exactly call them scenes of intimacy because it’s just physical, but somehow they’ve both gotten feelings involved. Instead, Hannah’s insecurities and unresolved issues just keep popping up, with no real resolution of these things. I get that this is a first book in a series and will be setting up a lot of the story for further books, but this read like YA more than anything. I learned afterwards that the author has written other books in the YA range, yet the adult characters often behaved like teenagers, with the same amount of thought before their actions.

“Maybe the Hannah in Towerfall is closer to who I really am. Or at least who I want to be.”

Overall, this book wound up being an okay read, but nothing special for me. All of the basic factors that I adore were in this book—portal fantasy, elements of tarot, and fake dating, but it never overcame the shortcomings that made it hard for me to really like this book. I much prefer seeing growth over the course of a story, watching characters change and improve themselves, and getting to know women who are strong, smart, and confident, while this book really didn’t offer any aspects of that. I think that the book will most likely appeal to readers who are already fans of Kristin Cast, those who like YA fantasy, people who enjoy slower-paced fantasy, and don’t mind a scene involving a pomegranate being used in a way that it isn’t meant to be used.

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