I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I had to read this entire book before I realised it's written by the author of The Tea Master and the Detective, the Sherlock retelling I've been meaning to read.

In The Vanishers' Palace is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast where Beauty is a scholar and the Beast is a spirit dragon that lives in a Palace impossible to understand. Also, they're both women.

This was a brilliantly written novel with fantastically visual descriptions, although it made my head spin sometimes. The world and the culture whose mythology its based on was very unfamiliar and sometimes I felt like I was lacking some basic knowledge to really understand, but I still enjoyed becoming familiar.

The book has two major nonbinary side characters, but that is not the only reason why it's nonbinary-friendly. Nobody's gender in this book is assumed by their appearance, and they are only referred to with gendered terms once they established it with the language they use for themselves.

Read the full review on my blog, A Thousand Worlds.