Runebreaker (Part 1 - Overview)
Hello, all. Welcome to the review of Runebreaker, an indie Romantasy by Mila Finch.
Some of you will have been expecting this review, as it was promised back in January during the discussion of Show Don’t Tell and again in March while doing the spotlight analysis of the scene involving a dam breach. For those who weren’t, I originally picked this book up because I was looking to explore more Romantasy beyond overhyped schlock or an indie author I’m already accustomed to. My goal was to find and showcase some Romantasy that demonstrated the true potential of this genre. None of the popular Romantasy titles sounded at all encouraging, so I went to the indie titles recommended by Kindle.
Runebreaker had a premise that, while not original, at least sounded promising. The opening hooked me. There are good ideas here that I wanted to like.
Unfortunately … Runebreaker proved itself to be the exact opposite of what I’m looking for.
I really did try my best to find nice things to say about this book. Unlike with The Empyrean, I can’t say that this book is inappropriately marketed. I was prepared to issue my criticisms while acknowledging the aspects that could either be chalked up to taste or else were genuine positives.
And, despite how many problems I saw, I found myself feeling positively inclined towards this book. Perhaps this was just me working overtime to find something positive to say, or maybe it’s just the fact that this book reads like the author genuinely cares about the story she’s telling. Either way, I found elements that I either really liked or that were good concepts fumbled by poor execution.
The problem is that, despite this bias in favor of this book, I can’t ignore that fact that it is worse than Iron Flame. It is, to date, the worst book we have yet reviewed. For the first time, we have a book with a rating lower than 1/10. It may not literally be illegible, but it is written in such a contradictory manner that one simply cannot use one’s brain and enjoy the story. It is a book that is better if you can’t read it.
Enough burying the lead. Let’s get into it.
STATS
Title: Runebreaker
Series: [Untitled Trilogy] (Book 1)
Author(s): Mila Finch
Genre: Fantasy (Romantasy)
First Printing: January 2026
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Throughout this review, there will be mild, unmarked spoilers for Runebreaker. I will do my best to keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly marked sections.
Regarding the Note from the Author
Finch has directly requested that reviewers not spoiler the ending of the book. On the last page of the text, she wrote:
One small favor: if you’re leaving a review, please don’t spoil the ending. Rage about it. Warn readers. Curse my name if you must, but let them experience the ending the same way you did.
I will not be honoring this request. The ending of the book is where the story finally breached into unprecedented depths of utter insanity. If I don’t spoil the ending, then my analysis will be reduced to, “Finch’s writing makes Yarros’s writing seem psychologically sound by comparison. No, I can’t tell you why. Just trust me, bro.” That would be far more unfair to Finch than simply ignoring her request.
That said, I will confine everything specific to the ending to the sections (or posts) marked for heavy spoilers.
STRUCTURE
This will, by necessity, be a multi-part review, which will be releasing each Sunday from now through June 7th.
Part 1 (Today, March 22nd) - Overview
Premise
Genre
Rating
Content Warning
Prose
Part 2 (March 29th) - Romance
Part 3 (April 5th) - Power Fantasy
Part 4 (April 12th) - Worldbuilding: Magic & Dragons
Part 5 (April 19th) - Worldbuilding: Fae
Part 6 (April 26th) - Characters: Aelie
Part 7 (May 3rd) - Characters: Aelie, continued
Part 8 (May 10th) - Characters: Kairos
Part 9 (May 17th) - Characters: Vaeris
Part 10 (May 24th) - Plot: Oppression & Oaths
Part 11 (May 31st) - Plot: The Collapsing Climax
Part 12 (June 7th) - Retrospective
PREMISE
From Amazon’s Kindle product page for this book:
Aelie can break runes with her bare hands—magic the fae built their entire world on.
They hate her for it. Fear her for it. And when she's caught, they sentence her to die.
Desperate to survive, she shatters the rune enslaving Kairos, a devastatingly handsome fae executioner with a blood-soaked past.
Big mistake.
Kairos slaughters the court and drags Aelie to his breathtaking realm—a kingdom of towering forests and shimmering mists.
Bound to the ruthless king she freed, Aelie must navigate deadly fae politics, master her forbidden power, and resist the fae who sees her as his greatest weapon... and darkest obsession.
There was also this additional note. I missed this when I was deciding whether or not to buy the book. How I missed it, I’m not sure - it wasn’t like it was hidden - but it does recontextualize the premise.
Runebreaker is a steamy, fast-paced romantasy with forced proximity, he-falls-first tension, and captive/captor dynamics perfect for adult fans of Jennifer L. Armentrout and Sarah J. Maas. It features a feral, morally gray hero, a twenty-five-year-old heroine with a dangerous gift, mating bond tension, and immersive world building. This is book #1 of a trilogy.
Reaction
I really need to stop giving anything branded as Romantasy the benefit of the doubt.
I took the last sentence of the premise at face value. I expected political maneuvering and an exploration of Aelie’s powers. Instead, all the focus was put on the “obsession”. Those first two points are given lip service so the focus is on the buildup to pornography. It was foolish to expect anything else.
I’m not mad about that … from a marketing perspective. Unlike with The Empyrean, I don’t think this book was misleadingly marketed. Sure, it’s another example that convinces me that Romantasy should be divorced from Fantasy and treated purely as a subgenre of Romance, but at least the marketing warned about the Romance angle. The fact that certain promises were window dressing make sense if you only want a Romance and don’t really expect to find any of the elements that would make this interesting as a Fantasy story.
So, while this book did not give me what I wanted, I did at least try to keep an open mind. I was hoping to write a review that cut around the schlock and sludge and praised the elements of the writing that worked. And there are a few things here to praise. One of the aspects of the setting that gets brought up in the premise and isn’t window dressing is this idea that the fae built their world on runes. That’s something that shows the potential this book had as a Fantasy. If you can tolerate everything that makes this book an example of the worst aspects of Romantasy, then you won’t be disappointed by what this book promises.
GENRE
I’ll give Finch this much: this book is a proper Romantic Fantasy.
The Fantasy story is mostly irrelevant to the narrative. It only really plays into the events prior to the inciting incident and into the final act. Still, through her system of rune magic, Finch at least tries to give the book a Fantasy backbone. The fantastical is essential to the narrative, even if it doesn’t drive most of the plot.
As for the Romance … well, it’s badly written, and it only supports the stereotype of Romance literature all being pornography, but at least the romantic relationship is a driver behind the plot. Kairos makes certain decisions in this book that are wholly irrational for him to make yet make sense through the lens of his attraction towards Aelie. So this book does at least have a better claim to being Romantasy than The Empyrean does.
RATING: 0.5/10
As soon as I realized that I was reading was a cliché-heavy porno within a Fantasy shell, I made peace with that. Yes, I was obviously going to flag these features, but there was room to analysis everything else. I tried to meet this book on its own terms.
The book failed to meet me on the terms it set.
Remember when I said that power fantasy is to Onyx Storm what cancer is to Deadpool, only without Deadpool’s charm? The same could be said about the clichés in this book. Runebreaker is a mass of overused tropes without the connective tissue to hold them together. It begs you to be caught up in whatever emotions Finch is trying to push in a given scene, prays that you will be too invested in the tropes to think critically, and leaves the rest of the story as a void. The few details that are given outside of the clichés are contradictory, and while some of those contradictions could have been bridged with a bit more exposition, others fundamentally break the narrative.
I was not exaggerating up above when I said that Yarros’s writing seems stable compared to this book. The story of The Empyrean is rife with delusion and hypocrisy, and Yarros lies to her audience to force her narrative in certain directions, but delusion and hypocrisy need a baseline to be measured against, while lying shows that Yarros is at least aware that the audience will notice something is wrong if she doesn’t get in front of the problems she lies about. The contradictions in Runebreaker go unacknowledged. We just have to turn our brains off and accept that the reality of the story changes Because the Author Said So.
I think the issue here is the Author's Assumption (to use KrimsonRogue’s term for this). Maybe, in Finch’s head, there are no contradictions. Maybe she thought of a way to tie everything together, but decided not to put it on the page, assuming that this information was either obvious or already adequately delivered. So, while I think this book is objectively worse than The Empyrean, the flaws don’t frustrate me to nearly the same degree.
What does frustrate me is the fact that there are genuinely good ideas buried in the muck. Finch toyed with things that could have made for a satisfying narrative. Unfortunately, thanks to the contradictory writing, the things I want to praise actually make the book worse. Finch’s few stabs are something more than cliché produce something weaker than if she’d stuck to the clichés.
CONTENT WARNING
Pornography
The “Romance” of this book is just a long buildup to graphic sex scenes, of which there are three:
Chapter 39
Chapter 48
Chapter 53
There’s also a lot of emphasis on how sexually attractive Kairos is and how Aelie’s body reacts to him, plus lots of sexual banter (like how Kairos has a “spirit” bound inside him that, on top of giving him bloodbending powers, also makes him sexually aggressive).
Curiously, there is a fourth sex scene (Chapter 54) that is not pornographic. It’s more detailed than strictly necessary, but it isn’t excessive, and it’s only a few short paragraphs. Compared to so much sex in modern fiction, it’s practically fade-to-black. It also focuses on emotion rather than the physical desire.
This last scene baffles me. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer this, but if Finch is able to write the sex like this, why didn’t she write all the scenes like this? This contrast only confirms how extraneous those “steamy” scenes are.
Violence / Gore / Death / Suffering
I’ve reviewed a good chunk of Warhammer 40K material by this point. When I tell you that Runebreaker’s handling of dark elements reads like edgelord fanfiction, please understand the baseline I’m working from. This is another case where the franchise stigmatized for having a socially ill-adjusted fanbase comes off seeming far more mature than a book that is supposed to appeal to people on an emotional level.
It’s not just that there’s so much blood, so much killing, so much over-the-top suffering. It’s that Finch presents these things as if we are supposed to think they are the darkest, coolest, and sexiest things ever. We are meant to see Karios as so dangerous and oh so sexy, the “beast” who could maim Aelie at a moment’s notice while only ever showing her aggression of the sexual variety. Maybe this will bother readers who have never read this level of violence and gore before, but if you have experience with darker and grittier stories, this is so transparent.
What’s particularly baffling about this is how Finch then undermines those ideas. She wants Kairos to have done and keep doing all these horrible things so he can be dark, but then she will double back to affirm that he is so soft and sweet and loving and can’t really be held accountable for all these horrible things. She wants the edge without accepting that said edge has to cut into her darlings.
PROSE
I don’t have any issues with the prose (in and of itself, at least). The only meaningful critcisms I have is that it doesn't carry a strong narrative voice and doesn't aid immersion. The flip side of this is that, at the very least, does doesn’t read like a story told by someone from the modern Western world. I had no trouble suspending disbelief and believing that Aelie is a product of this setting.
BROKEN BONES
Runebreaker is a Romantasy that throws its Fantasy plot aside to focus on mounting sexual tension between the blank slate Female Main Character and the Bad Boy Love Interest. That doesn’t inherently make it a bad book. It just needs to offer a good story to go with the clichés.
Sadly, it did not offer that. All we got was pornography married to a checklist of tropes. There is no emotional growth between the characters. Aelie just insists she can’t trust Kairos while the tension ratchets ever-higher, than decides she loves him after enough sex happens.
We’ll get into the weeds of this on Sunday, March 29th. Until then, thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now available!
Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.
To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?
Come for slow-burn tension, and Enemies-to-Lovers dynamic, and bone-based engineering! I hope to see you there. Volume II is in development!
