(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
There’s a good reason the enemies-to-love trope is so prevalent in romantic literature.
While we all accept on some level that not everyone will like us and that conflict is all inevitable despite our best efforts, there’s a deep-rooted part of us that wants to believe that we are universally likeable, and as this romantic trope makes abundantly clear, inherently loveable.
Quite how much we abundantly want and need to believe that former adversaries can fall lustfully and longingly forever into each other’s arms is borne out in the delightful romantasy, Tusk Love by Thea Guanzon which goes full bore into the trope, offering two people who come from such different worlds that they shouldn’t be able to find any piece of common ground on which to meet.
But meet aristocratic 20-year-old Guinevere, who is betrothed to marry a lord she has never met, and Oskar, a tall, handsome ex- blacksmith apprentice half-orc do on the road to the major coastal city of the Dwendalian Empire and not in the sort of circumstances that usually make the writers’ room of most rom-coms.
With her cart laden with highly valuable goods meant for her betrothed, sweet, sheltered Guinevere is a prime candidate for attack by highway thieves and sure enough they swarm her, with Guinevere, who harbours a deep secret, only surviving ultimately thanks to Oscar’s intervention (she does, however, without giving away anything concrete, play a key role in saving herself too).
Her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Then she startled him by walking briskly ahead, leaving him in the dust.
He suppressed a reluctant grin. The hedgehog had claws, after all.
So, within a short period of Tusk Love opening, two completely disparate souls find themselves yoked together by violent circumstance, and while Oskar could walk off and leave Guinevere to her pre-assigned fate, the truth is that he is too honourable and good a man to abandon a woman who has never left the privileged neighbourhood in which she grew up.
With her few remaining valuables in hand, including a chest sealed by magic in which something valuable sits, Guinevere, her life well and truly mapped out by ambitious parents in such a way there is no wiggle room at all, sets off with Oskar who, by way of contrast and mired in the grief of a recent traumatic loss, whose life is so wide open that it is all but barren and unnavigable.
These two souls, each lost in their own way, end up coming together out of necessary circumstance but as Tusk Love progresses, it becomes clear that Guinevere, with her passion and love for a life unfettered by convention and obligation, and Oskar, who has not allowed himself any emotional softness in a hard scrabble life may have found the other half of their broken hearts.
Of course, neither will admit that at the start of the book and in fact, much of the fun of the first part of Tusk Love is reading their sparring and witty barbs and witnessing two completely divergent worlds clash on the Amber Road to the rather fetchingly named Menageries Coast where Guinevere’s new life awaits.
(courtesy official author site)
The big question of course in all their journeying, and they have to travel quite a distance on foot and horseback and through towns and swamps and forest unending, as they grow closer and the initial barbs and clashes give way to soft affection then hard lust and ultimately love – not a spoiler; one of the comforting part of any rom-com, and romantasies are no different, is that we know, pretty much, where it’s all going to end up – is what happens to them over the long term?
We know, or we think we know and good lord, if not that then we’re certainly hoping because these two people absolutely deserve and need to be together, that it will all work out in the end, but Guanzon does a thoroughly good job of making it all but impossible, on paper at least, for Guinevere and Oskar to walk off into whatever kind of sunset the Dwendalian Empire offers.
Guinevere, after all, may long for a life of freedom and unfettered agency, but her parents need her to marry well and she feels an obligation to make sure their wishes are heeded and that they get what they want (when you meet them in the final act, you wonder how anyone could think these two graspingly ambitious people deserve anything but social and financial oblivion and as little to do with their goodhearted daughter as possible).
But will events mean that she can act on her heart and claim a life with Oskar, which he surely and desperately wants, or will she be consigned to the dead hand of pragmatic fate?
She was silent for a while, considering his words. Then she wrapped her arms around his waist until they were as close as two people could be in their clothes. He rubbed her back soothingly, and he truly meant it when he said, ‘Whatever you decide, everything’s going to be fine, and you’re going to be brilliant, Gwen. You always are.’
Tusk Love has a lot of fun keeping us in fervently wishing and hoping suspense and keep us on the edge of our hearts with our hearts firmly in mouth right up almost the end.
It may feel a little cruel to torture us so, but Guanzon masterfully teases things out in such a way that when the denouement comes, it feels wholly satisfying and exactly fitting what the story demands and needs.
Delightful in every wonderfully immersive moment with two characters who, as they are winning each other’s hearts most certainly win yours, for the duration of the book and beyond, Tusk Love is funny, heartfelt, earnest and light, and full of some searingly intense and emotionally rich moments that add real weight to a rollicking rom-com fantasy.
Pleasingly, it’s a brilliantly original take on well used trope and so buoyantly imaginative and emotionally vivacious that you fly through pages, glorying in the witticisms and the barbs, the confessions and the sleight of hands and happy to spend as much time as possible with two people, who damn all the gods and their fate assigning ways, have to be with each other.
Sure, Tusk Love ends up pretty much where you it expect to, but it does so in ways that are a joy to experience, feel fresh and new and which win your heart over and over again so that by the end, while Oskar and Guinevere are definitely in love, you most certainly are too.