Tropes: Dystopian Romance, Dual POV, Academy Setting, Slow Burn
A widow finally letting herself love again. A daughter who can’t let go of her grief. And a truth buried deep enough to unravel them both. This character-driven, slow-burn dystopian romance is perfect for readers who’ve been waiting for a woman over 40 to be the one leading the story, not just supporting it.
In the Five Realms, your worth is decided before you’re old enough to understand it. Marked. Mixed. Unmarked. A childhood exam determines your whole future: your field of study, your career, and your place in society.
Mara Thorne, a 43-year-old widow and mother to 18-year-old twins, has spent her life inside that system. Until recently, she thought she understood exactly how it worked.
Three years after her husband’s death, she’s hired as an alchemy professor at Greymore Academy, where her son and daughter attend. She’s finally building something for herself when she meets Kade Matthias, a former soldier who sees her in a way she wasn’t expecting.
Then her daughter, someone who’s kept her at arm’s length since her father died, discovers something about the virus that killed him. Something that was never supposed to be found. It changes everything Mara thought she knew, about her husband’s death, and about a world she’d already decided was broken.
Mara’s already lost everything once. Now she has to decide if she’ll risk it again. For love. For the truth