I first heard about Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit during one of the several billion San Diego Comic-Con panels I listened to over the summer (which I’m pretty sure was several billion years ago), and I was on board from “space opera” plus “prince and count fall in love!” plus “suspected murder.”

Listen, I contain multitudes, and sometimes they combine in weird ways. I don’t complain.

I’ve heard some mutterings about this one I want to address at the outset because they aren’t valid critiques. Not every book is for everyone. That’s fine. And it’s fine to offer critique and constructive criticism when warranted. However:

• The blurb for Winter’s Orbit flat out tells you that Kiem and Jainan’s marriage is arranged. If you miss that, the very first conversation in the book is about said marriage. If you read the whole book and then complain that it revolves around an arranged marriage, I’m not going to read or listen to the rest of your critique, let alone meditate on its validity. Now begone, lest somebody drops a house on you.
• Winter’s Orbit is a romance in a space opera framework. If that’s not what you’re looking for, that is totally cool. Calling it tropey because it’s not what you expected, however, is a low blow and also incorrect. It is very much not that. Not being some kind of heavily symbolic, deep-space, drama-fest does not make it unworthy. I have read plenty of garbage space opera in my 42 years of life. And the fact that Winter’s Orbit is romance does not make it less worthy than, say, The Expanse. It just makes it different. If you’re going to be a judgey asshole about it, you also get the house.

As it happens, I love The Expanse novels, and I also loved Winter’s Orbit.

So there.

I love the juxtaposition of this personal story set against an intergalactic one. I love that Maxwell created such distinct characters in Kiem, Jainan, and Bel – and that they aren’t perfect. No one wants paragons, especially right now when we’re all forced to live with our own imperfections right in front of our salads all the time. (Perfect characters aren’t interesting anyway.)

But even the minor players in Winter’s Orbit are given life with careful snippets of dialogue, a facial expression or gesture, or even the choice of who they stand next to. Often, in space operas, it’s difficult to care about individual characters because the scope of the story is so massive; in Winter’s Orbit, the macro and micro are balanced by character development. It gives readers a much greater stake in the story, bringing them in close and keeping them there.

I’m also fascinated by the ways in which Maxwell explored the concepts of home and family. Is there always a little bit of our birthplace in us? Can we ever truly be reborn as someone else? Can we do it for someone else? Should we? Where does our responsibility to others end? What is home? What is family? What is love?

As with the characters, examining the ways in which individual characters and the larger galactic contingent consider and answer these questions gives the reader different views of the universe in which the story is set, contributing to both world-building and plot in an active manner that moves the story and avoids info-dumps or other interludes that tend to disrupt the narrative.

Perhaps most importantly, I enjoyed watching Kiem and Jainan get to know each other, to figure each other out as people rather than symbols or tropes. Their world is complicated, and they each have responsibilities on top of the normal human crap that would make being thrown together with someone you’ve only just met complicated in the best of circumstances, let alone when the fate of your galaxy is entirely dependent on the pair of you being able to convince a third party you don’t know that everything is fine, absolutely fine.

I’m sorry, you think his late husband who only just died a month ago was what? Murdered? The fact that they can’t figure out how to talk to each other because they’re both trying desperately to make things easy is just peak… something that would happen to so many people I know. Kiem is my new sweet disaster son, and Maxwell deals sensitively and honestly with Jainan’s anxiety and the (content warning) issue of domestic abuse that haunts his relationship with his previous partner.

I adored this book. It was everything I was hoping for and more. I hope Everina Maxwell writes many, many more books. My only very slight critique is that the editing in a few sections could have been a little bit tighter, but otherwise… it was pretty much perfect.

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell (Tor) is scheduled for publication on 2/2/21.