As much as I really wanted to like this, for me this was a book that had crazy vibes but didn't fully deliver on them in a way that satisfied me as a reader.


I want to start by saying that the premise is fascinating—we have an amnesiac protagonist who wakes up in some unknown woods with a cultlike group of cannibalistic individuals he doesn't seem to know, and is immediately drawn into their plot to reach the top of a sacred mountain and resurrect the old gods of the world. The language and word choices that create setting are gorgeous, and they paint a vivid picture of the stark, claustrophobic, unfamiliar landscape through which the characters are moving. The way the cannibalism scenes (of which there are *many*) are described in a way that genuinely turned my stomach a couple of times, and I'm a pretty unflinching reader in general.


Unfortunately, I think it's in the very limited character perspective that things start to fall apart for this book. We have no information about our protagonist, Kestrel, whch makes it immediately difficult to connect with him as a reader. We don't get a ton of insight into his actual personality even as the book progresses—for the most part it seems like Kestrel's main personality traits are 1) determination to escape (valid), 2) affection for Shrew (also valid, but sort of out of left field and not interrogated very deeply), and 3) his growing desire to eat human flesh (gross, and also really not the cause of very much reflection). I think there were a lot of opportunities to do the character work and create a more compelling protagonist even from our amnesiac friend, but the author brushes past them in favor of moving the cast along, so ultimately I was left not really caring about the stakes or the action.


Overall I would say that this book is wonderfully atmospheric and genuinely creepy in some places, but it doesn't hit the mark for me in terms of making me invested in the way the story is going to play out.


Thank you to Quill & Crow and NetGalley for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review!

I admit I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to rate this book, because while it was beautifully written and experimental in very fun and engaging ways, it was also fucking devastating and I don't think I'm likely to reread again because my heart can only handle so much! 

I feel like the best word I can use to describe this book is "messy." I don't mean that in a negative way, in fact quite the opposite -- the messiness of the interpersonal relationships, the politics of the world, and the characters' internal motivations is actually really compelling, and I think that messiness does a lot to drive the story forward. Hammer is so jaded that she's completely unable to be optimistic or hopeful about the world or her place in it; Naias is so blinded by her ambition that she doesn't realize that it's not possible for the oppressed to gain their liberation by convincing the oppressor to like them. And in the end, none of them are able to escape the yoke of empire.

(Actually, the premise of this novel can be succinctly summed up in the words of Audre Lorde: "The master's tools can never dismantle the master's house." Obviously she was writing in a very different context, but the words themselves echo -- throughout the novel, even as they rage against the empire that subjugates them, all of the characters still try to work within the boundaries of that empire to plot their escapes. They are really only to achieve liberation and rebirth when they finally raze the whole thing to the ground.)

I found that this was a book where many of the characters were deeply unlikable but nonetheless compelling. In a similar vein to my review of Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, it reminded me once again that people deserve liberation from oppression regardless of whether I find them individually likeable. Earlier I mentioned the book being interestingly experimental, and this was one of the experimental bits that I really enjoyed: having a narrative voice that not only directly addresses the reader, but also is quite incisive in its challenge to what I'm sure many readers (including myself) were thinking.

"Tyranny doesn't happen in the blink of an eye," she says. "It is a slow descent, helped by the complicity of those who think they have no power." Later, she adds, "I would've acted differently, you say, thinking up all the different vectors that make you special I would've seen this for what it was. I would stand up against injustice." These were well-timed interjections for me, located around 75% of the way into the book, when things are just about to break bad in a major way and when many readers (talking about myself here) are making comments in their Notes app like "Khall is so annoying lmao girl stand UP." 

Anyway, this book was crazy. It was also devastating and brutal and I probably wouldn't read it again or recommend it to people who don't like being depressed after they're done with a book. Also, a horse really hates to see Elaine Ho coming, I fear. But this was a beautifully written book and even though I need to go lay down and think about my life choices for a while, I really did enjoy the journey.

I picked this book up genuinely at random off the recommendation of a stranger in a TikTok comment section and then I read the whole thing in 4 hours. This book was genuinely so much fun? Once again, I love a concept that really makes me go "How did you even think of this?" and in this case, an iteration of 1969 Madison, WI but with magic and demigods really made me ask that question. 

My likes: The magic in this world was interesting and complex but also not fully explained, which somehow just made it feel even more realistic, like the characters have no need to mull on how magic works because it's just such a normal part of their lives. 

I also was a little worried, based on the time period, that there would be quite a bit more overt homophobia, and I was pleased to be wrong about that—there are some oblique intimations that maybe someone else out there might care about two men in a relationship, but none of that ever shows up from a key character, not even the ones with whom the MCs have tense relationships. As someone who generally prefers not to run into much homophobia in my fantasy (because there's enough of it in the real world) that was really refreshing for me. 

Lastly, I just really enjoyed the personalities of the two MCs. I like that they're very different people with very different backgrounds but it's also clear how and why they would be attracted to each other, magical spoiler reasons notwithstanding. And even though the progression of their relationship is... somewhat nontraditional and definitely not super linear, it's still a believable relationship that isn't forced through any contrived misunderstandings in order to drag out the will-they won't-they tension. 

My gripes: Honestly, none really? I guess maybe it would have been fun to see a little more about where the magic system actually comes from, and I could make a case for dragging the climactic scenes out a little bit just to build suspense, but overally I thought this was a fun and quick-paced book. 

Super glad I took that random TikTok comment rec and now have a new series to hyperfixate on!

I want to start with the things I liked about this book, beginning with the magic system. This review does contain spoilers so please read cautiously! Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

I was talking to my roommate about how much we struggle with manga like My Hero Academia and Bleach (walk with me, I swear it's relevant) because it seems that the creator's solution for writing themselves into a corner is to give the protagonist a new skill out of nowhere that will somehow miraculously aid them in escaping their current circumstances. Aside from the classifications of magic, which were already interesting enough, the thing I liked the most about the magic system is how the skill tree is sort of built in, so there's an in-world mechanism for leveling up existing skills through practice and circumstance--which in turn makes it much less jarring when those skills do develop! I also like that the magic school isn't set up as some kind of egalitarian paradise, but rather that it's acknowledged and wrestled with in the text that there's privilege in being able to attend Paragon, and that not everyone has an equal shot at acceptance. 

Secondly, I think the exploration of gender in this book is really interesting. One of the reasons I was interested in reading is because I feel that own-voices trans narratives deserve more of a space in the sci-fi/fantasy literary world, and to that end I think Petra Lord did a really masterful job of exploring the nuances of gender expression in a world where you can theoretically swap between sexes whenever you want (as long as you have the money for it). She does a fantastic job of exploring how alien and claustrophobic Ana's Edgar body feels to her as someone who is decidedly female but stuck in a male body, and how much more at ease she feels when her outsides match her insides -- but she also explores Nell/Wes's somewhat more ambiguous feelings about being born in a female body and now living in a male one, and Nima's feelings about being both at once. The thoughtful handling of these different relationships to gender and sex were one of my favorite things about the book.

Also, the prose was just really lovely! Even on a line-by-line level I felt that descriptions flowed smoothly and that the figurative language was fresh and interesting without seeming overwrought. Interestingly, the word choice also neatly straddled the line between old-fashioned and modern, which gave a sort of timelessness to the setting. Just from an "enjoyment of reading" perspective I really enjoyed that.

However, there were also a few things that were big misses for me. A couple of them are rather minor, so I'll get them out of the way first:

• Why does the word manga exist in this world when Japan doesn't? In fact, early on in the book we get quite a lot of manga references -- that she's a romance manga reader, that her Codex skill is named after a skill in her favorite manga, etc. -- and then after about one-third of the book we never hear about the manga again.
• Nell/Wes is unable to remember her mother's surname following her Ousting because of the memory blocks, but she can remember her father's full name even though they have the same last name. Shouldn't she be unable to remember either OR remember both?
• A curse was used to remove the entire Shenti language from the world, but when Ana enters Khaiovhe's pocket universe she hears characters speaking Shenti. 

The other things that were misses for me were a little more significant. The first is that we're told, repeatedly and by many characters, that Ana is an incredible strategist and a genius planner, and yet we rarely -- if ever -- actually see her strategize on-page. It seemed that most of the planning she does is off-page and only referenced once the action is over. In fact, what we see even more of on-page is Ana rushing headlong and thoughtlessly into danger, then getting her ass kicked -- and more than once, that ass-kicking ends with her somehow succeeding in her goal anyway because the person who kicked her ass is so impressed by her strategy skills. (Huh??) I wish that there had been more work done on-page to establish Ana's critical thinking skills and ability to strategize and come up with plans and gambits for her crew. It just felt quite a lot like the reader is being smacked over the head with the idea that Ana is great at planning, but we're kind of expected to believe it without evidence.

The second bigger miss for me is honestly the whole country of Shenti. The "enemy" country with the bloodthirsty dictator who wants to conquer the whole world, who sends his citizens to "redemption camps" when they outlive their usefulness to the state (or when they commit petty crimes)... is just China? Some of the names of the camps that Khaiovhe liberates are actual Chinese words ("lianhua" means lotus flower and "Hengshui" is an actual city in Hebei province, for example) and others, like Qinhua and Meidong, are pretty clearly meant to draw from Chinese. I guess I personally am just a little tired of second-world fantasy novels using China as the stand-in for the evil warlike nation that the protagonist nation is fighting against, even if it's shown by the end of the book that Caimor isn't all it's cracked up to be either.

All in all, I do think that this book has a really interesting premise, and I think Petra Lord has an absolutely stunning writing style and does a fantastic job with navigating the internal lives of her protagonists. I think she's created a lush and interesting world of magic that is full of potential for incredible storytelling. I just hope that the editors of this and the next books will pay a little more mind to the things mentioned above. Even though this installation didn't totally hit for me, I plan to stay tuned for the second and see where this world will go!