I want to take the time to highlight this book, because I absolutely love it, and at the same time I think to be in the minority opinion. But it was a great queer read for me and I can’t wait for the next one.
The story
Even teenage assassins have dreams.
Eli isn’t just a teenage girl — she’s a made-thing the witches created to hunt down ghosts in the human world. Trained to kill with her seven magical blades, Eli is a flawless machine, a deadly assassin. But when an assignment goes wrong, Eli starts to question everything she was taught about both worlds, the Coven, and her tyrannical witch-mother.
Worried that she’ll be unmade for her mistake, Eli gets caught up with a group of human and witch renegades, and is given the most difficult and dangerous task in the worlds: capture the Heart of the Coven. With the help of two humans, one motorcycle, and a girl who smells like the sea, Eli is going to get answers — and earn her freedom.
The review
I picked this from the library’s ebook collection, knowing nothing about it, because the cover spoke to me. I was hooked from the first page.
At that point I read the summary and it sounded like your regular YA novel so I was a bit disappointed. But that wasn’t really what I got. It’s a brilliant story, very queer (always a nice surprise, I usually *pick* books because they’re queer rather than finding out as I read) with all leads being some flavour of LGBT+ and the main love interest being nonbinary. It’s refreshing.
The worldbuilding was subtle and dreamy. It’s not that straightforward alternate universe that makes perfect logical sense, it’s more like Alice in Wonderland or Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart A Doorway, in that you piece out the logic as you go and not everything makes sense at first, and it’s not the kind of universe that works like our own world, which was refreshing to read too. It has the atmosphere of a fairy tale.
I think one of the main attractions for me was Eli’s experience of herself and her trauma. Our heroine is clearly struggling with who she is as someone who’s only ever been treated as a tool, and not a person, and struggling with the fact that her mother is cruel and abusive while also in other ways protecting her. This was all too relatable.
Overall the writing really hit home, the worldbuilding was really dreamy and I was very much rooting for the main cast. One thing I would say is that sometimes it was not always clear what was going on, in ways that perhaps could’ve been written more clearly without losing the atmosphere.
Overall however, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I will be looking forward to the second volume!
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Sounds like an interesting story… I love fantasy so much so I can’t wait to read it✌