I am looking for a story about an MC (or more than one MC) who is enduring captivity / lack of freedom in some form (prisoner of war, intended sacrifice for a cult, arranged marriage, enslaved, locked in a tower, etc.) and does NOT fall in love with their captor. I would prefer a fantasy setting, but speculative fiction or dystopian could be okay, too. I am not looking for anything in our real world, not a modern setting nor lots of technology.
If there is any romance at all with another character (not the captor) it should be a side element and not a primary plotline, not super sappy, not instant/sudden love, no big age gaps or imbalanced power dynamic between them. Perferably, any romance, if there is one, would have been established before the start (think Aragorn & Arwen in LotR or Robin Hood & Marion in Disney's animated Robin Hood movie) or at least develop slowly / naturally.
Books I have enjoyed that fit include Gathering Blue, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Sunrise on the Reaping, Cinder (and I'm willing to go darker than some of those / non-YA). The premises of Warbreaker, Emprire of Sand, Gilded, and The Blue Sword sounded like what I wanted, but they didn't quite deliver because they either had too many twists where the villains weren't actually villains and/or the captivity wasn't really that bad and/or romance took over the plot too much.
The MC should be having a bad time in general and can't escape for the majority of the story.
Thanks!
by EnfysNest051
1 Comment
Have you tried The Poppy War? Rin goes through some absolutely brutal captivity situations and definitely doesn’t romanticize her captors – quite the opposite actually. Fair warning though, it gets pretty dark especially in the later books