YMMV / The Bearkeepers Daughter

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Near the end of the book, Justinian makes John a count and gives him a command on the condition he leave for Arabia as soon as possible. John happily accepts this offer, and he and Euphemia leave the next day to claim their new titles of count and countess. This is presented as a mildly risky but very bright future for them both—John has a chance to prove himself in a high-ranking position, and Euphemia's status and wealth are both restored. However, there are several issues with this. Multiple characters allude to some kind of precarious military "situation" that needs managing in Arabia, and Justinian describes the generals and soldiers there as "insubordinate" and rebellious. The empire is also recovering from a disastrous plague, a volcanic winter, and several questionable wars that left their resources thin and their territory greatly overextended. Neither John nor Euphemia are very experienced with governing, politics, or military matters; they're both plenty intelligent, but John is a secretary with limited military experience, and Euphemia is an aristocrat who's spent much of the book handling her father's finances. What are the actual chances that they'll be able to manage half a dozen disgruntled and insubordinate generals, in a province that's completely foreign to them, during a famously turbulent era?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • This novel is set several years after some of the most important points in Justinian and Theodora’s reign occurred, and events like the Nika riots, the plague, and most of the wars in Italy are never discussed in any real detail because they happened decades before the book began. While the story about John isn’t bad, per se, it feels at times like the author skipped over the most interesting years of Theodora’s life.
  • John the Cappadocian's rivalry with Theodora is never really shown, even though John the Cappadocian is very much alive (if in exile) throughout the events of the book and his daughter Euphemia is a major character. Combined with the above, it results in the overall feeling that the romance between John (the other John, Theodora's son) and Euphemia is a next-gen fic for a story that was never told.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Euphemia spends most of the story trying to get her family's wealth and status restored, since her father's exile has turned her into an Impoverished Patrician. However, the reader is explicitly told that her father is guilty of at least some of his alleged crimes (namely financial corruption and high treason), and that he may have committed murder as well. It is not difficult to draw the conclusion that John the Cappadocian very much deserved to lose his ill-gotten fortune, and Euphemia's genteel poverty is an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of her father experiencing perfectly rational consequences for his behavior.