“Women who did what they liked instead of what other people wished were often accused of witchcraft, because only a witch would be so defiant, or so it was thought.”

Rating: 3.5 stars.

I read this after reading [b:Alice|30196357|Alice (The Chronicles of Alice, #1)|Christina Henry|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463389480s/30196357.jpg|42955198] by the same author, and I was equally as excited by it. The titular mermaid is Amelia, who is caught by a fisherman and falls in love with him. Decades later, mourning her first love, she sets out to create a life in the city after P.T. Barnum tries to hire her for his show.

Christina Henry is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors, because her characters have depth and intrigue, but they're also realistic in the setting that they belong in. This story is set in the 1800s, and the characters reflect that in their attitudes and their behaviours. The best example of this is P.T. Barnum, who is a much closer reflection to the Barnum of history than the Greatest Showman Barnum is (even if that musical is a masterpiece!). I found myself often putting the book down to search for more information about Barnum, about the FeeJee Mermaid and all of his tangled history, and this was the first time I'd ever heard of Joice Heth. As such, this is a book that touches on topics of racism, misogyny and religion prompted hatred of the Other, but Henry handles them well, showing them through the lense of an outsider who is as disapproving as the reader feels. I was often angry and frustrated by the way characters were being treated, but that was because the portrayal felt so accurate.

As for the book itself, Henry's descriptions are flawless as usual, setting an atmosphere that feels so real I can taste the salt of the sea, and imagine the wind in Amelia's hair in Maine, all the way down to the creak of damp wood and the cramped pressure of a tank. This book is a lovely balance of mythology and realism, carefully balanced enough that even the moments of pure mysticism feel like they could have happened, and a mermaid really could have upped and joined the circus.

The Mermaid is less dark than Alice, even with all of the complicated aspects of racism and misogyny, but that isn't a bad thing, as this is far more a tale of loss and love and a search for belonging than it is a dark fairytale. Amelia isn't pretty or romantic, she's a wild, sharp-toothed, scaled creature of the sea, caught between two worlds she doesn't belong to and unwilling to sacrifice her sense of self to fit in.

“I was sixteen, still my mother’s prisoner, the night I became the whale.”

Rating: 3.5 stars

I picked up this book from my local library expecting to read a dark witch story about a new witch trying to solve her own murder. That isn't what I got. What I found instead was a story about a young girl who falls in love despite her best efforts, and is constantly denied the power she needs to help people - seemingly all she's ever wanted.

Avery Roe is due to be the next Roe Witch; the sea witch of Prince Island that keeps the whalers safe and brings the ships home, as well as casting charms for island residents. The current Roe Witch, Avery's grandmother, lives a lonely life at the far end of the island, separated from the residents who fear the witch as much as they need her. Despite this lonely world, Avery is desperate to take her grandmother's place and her birthright as the next Roe Witch, but her mother has stolen her away and denied her her legacy. When Avery's only power, dream-telling, tells her that she is to be murdered, she needs to become the witch even more, as a Roe Witch cannot be killed. To get back to her grandmother, she enlists the help of Tane, a harpoon boy who needs her help to avenge his family.

This book constantly kept me guessing. Every time I was convinced I had worked out what would happen next, how she would regain her powers, how this book would end, Kulper pulled the rug out from under my feet. By the time I finished the book (in one rapid sitting no less) I had been wrong about everything I suspected and I'd fallen in love with Prince Island.

The whaling business is a large aspect of this story, as it is a part of all of the characters lives and often discussed, but Kulper describes things well enough that despite knowing nothing about whaling I was able to keep up, without feeling like I was being spoonfed exposition. This focus on magic to help the whalers created a realism/fantasy blend that I really enjoyed as it was easy to imagine superstitious sailors asking for charms to bring them home safely or save them from drowning.

This book is incredibly Avery-centric, which usually annoys me, as it doesn't allow for characters in the background to be fully developed, but I'm willing to let that go in the case of Salt & Storm, as even that allowed Kulper to surprise me at the end with characters having motivations I could never have predicted. The Avery-centric view also fit the character, in my opinion, as Avery repeatedly reminds us that she wants to be the witch to help people, but she is still very focused on her own needs and her own desires - completely realistic as a sixteen year old girl.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I'm glad I picked it up, as I always pick up 'witch stories' but I would probably have left a 'historical romance' on the shelf. It's certainly opened my eyes to a genre that I would be far more interested in than I expected - especially with a little dash of fantasy elements. The ending was powerful, and the 'initiation' into being a witch was beautiful in its execution, and entirely unexpected even as I tried my hardest to predict it the whole way through the novel.

"'There are two kinds of guilt,' I say softly. 'The kind that's a burden and the kind that gives you purpose. Let your guilt be your fuel. Let it remind you of who you want to be. Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It's damaged but it's there. Don't let them take it from you, Elias.'"

Rating: 4 stars

I picked this up off my neverending stack of library books and nearly put it down again, as I've been caught in so many series lately that I've been making a concerted effort to read standalones or completed duologies. Reading this book was a complete accident, but boy am I glad I did.

The back of the book states 'Game of Thrones fans will relish', which is normally the kind of over-used comparison that makes me sigh and move away from a book. Here, it actually feels justified. Tahir's worldbuilding is beautiful, and she managed to masterfully create a society that made me not only believe in it wholly, fantasy setting and all, but made me angry.

The world that Laia and Elias live in is dark and horrible and awful. The Commandant is a foul bitch, mutilating her slaves when she isn't letting young soldiers rape them. It is a book full to the brim with rape and death, and a close up look at the gruesome realities of 'conquering' states, with a societally ingrained idea that certain groups are sub-human. But what I found more powerful than these predictably awful characters was the unpredictable. One of the supporting characters, presented mostly as a positive character, and in my opinion incredibly likeable and relatable for most of the novel, argues for these racist and classist views because they are all she knows. This is a powerful reflection on how many people have these trained, ingrained beliefs, and really made me pause to consider the way this novel reflects on modern society.

Elias and Laia are two characters that desperately want something. Elias wants freedom for himself, to do good, and Laia wants freedom for her brother, to do the right thing. Both find themselves constantly manipulated by outside parties, making half-promises to convince them to play a part in different schemes by convincing them that they can get what they want if only they do just one more thing. Both of their stories broke my heart, and I found myself deeply engaged in their personal quests, wanting to shout at my book whenever they came across another obstacle. They are an interesting pair, different in many ways and the same in others, and that made me enjoy their relationship far more than I usually enjoy love matches in fantasy books with complicated over-arching plot. It was handled well enough that I never had my usual moment of "isn't there something more important to being doing?", which even some of my favourite books suffer from.

Tahir's prose is beautiful, artfully constructed but never overcomplicated. The novel is simplistic at its core, and with such a complicated backstory and world to understand, this benefits it greatly. What it resulted in was an easy to read, engaging book that I actually struggled to put down, eating with one hand and grumpily putting away to hang out my laundry. I stayed up to race to the end tonight, because I'd never last until my lunchbreak at work tomorrow.

The book had a satisfying ending, of sorts, but there was no doubt that it was written with a sequel in mind, and now it's just the impatient wait for my library to tell me the next one is in stock! Despite having intended to avoid series', I am fully invested in this one, and I regret absolutely nothing.

“You are an ember in the ashes, Elias Veturius. You will spark and burn, ravage and destroy. You cannot change it. You cannot stop it.”

“You are full, Laia. Full of life and dark and strength and spirit. You are in our dreams. You will burn, for you are an ember in the ashes.”

“You are like a living rose among wax flowers. We may last forever, but you bloom brighter and smell sweeter, and draw blood with your thorns.”

Rating: 4.5 stars

I had about twelve highlights from this book, but only one usable review quote, because most of them were just snippets of Rook being an adorable dorky loser that I loved. I have such a weakness for powerful idiots, I swear. I'm giving Enchantment of Ravens 4.5 stars, but it was a very close call between 4.5 and 5. I think if I hadn't read this immediately after Sorcery of Thorns, I might have gone for 5 stars, but funnily enough I was still book-hungover enough from Margaret's newest book that her older one suffered ever so slightly in my opinion. Both books are incredible, though. I would say that Thorns is a fantasy with a side of romance, while Ravens is a romance in a fantasy setting. I tend to prefer the former over the latter, so that probably accounts more for the difference in rating than any actual flaws in the text. Because tbh, Rogerson's writing is near flawless to me.

An Enchantment of Ravens initially gave me huuuuuge ACOTAR vibes, with a clever human kidnapped by a beautiful fae prince, before sidestepping that in the coolest way ever. I am in love with the way the human/fae relationship is written in this book. The fae create enchantments for the humans, to keep them safe or bring them food, or whatever they would desire. In exchange, the humans create Craft. Craft is painting, writing, cooking, sewing. Things that we sometimes see as everyday skills. I love that in this world, humans have just as much magic as the fae, and it highlights that fae magic is mundane to the fae, just like our magic seems mundane to us. Even writing a letter was mystical to the fae. Humans who are particularly favoured by the fae may gain access to the Green Well, which allows them to become a fae and access fae magic, but in exchange they would lose their Craft. This totally threw me, in a really good way, because I'm always the first person to say "hell yeah I'd do whatever I needed to do to become fae/a witch/magic in some way" but here I stopped and considered it, and actually I don't think I would want to be immortal and magical if it meant I couldn't write or sew or cook.

I don't want to go into specifics too much, because I don't want to spoil it, but the use of fae glamours in Ravens is very cool, and really does make you rethink the idea of beautiful changeless fae.

The plot itself is fairly simple, but that's a good thing with a romance as it focuses much more on the developing relationship between Rook and Isobel, and I enjoyed the pace that it moved along at. If you want a fantastical love story this summer, Ravens is the way to go, with charming characters that weren't just stupid with love, and enough thrill and danger to keep it from getting boring. But you also better be reading [b:Sorcery of Thorns|42201395|Sorcery of Thorns|Margaret Rogerson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1541621322s/42201395.jpg|61425757], because that book deserves a read too...

She tastes of firestorms and ashes,
Of new beginnings and endings.
She is the monster stalking the dark,
The savior guarding the light.
She sleeps in a pit of vipers and fire,
And awakes in a windstorm of fury.
-Song of the Unnamed

Rating: 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Arrah is the sixteen year old daughter of two powerful witchdoctors, born to two long lines of powerful witchdoctors. Every year she waits for magic of her own, and every year Heka moves past her. When her last chance passes and she still has no magic of her own, Arrah has no time to dwell on the loss of the future she's always dreamed of. Children are going missing, and Arrah might be the only one who can find them. There is one more way that she can use magic, but the cost is high. Every spell might be her last.

This review has actually been hard to write, because I'm so enamoured with Kingdom of Souls. Honestly my only criticism is that there was a section of part 3 that I found a little slow but even saying that I read the majority of this book in one sitting and the pacing still felt really, really good. I've been loving the quality of the #ownvoices books coming out lately, and I need more diverse fantasy like this, and Gods of Jade and Shadow. Teach me your mythology and culture, please!!

Kingdom of Souls is dark, and there are lots of applicable trigger warnings to pay mind to. Rena has a really good list on Goodreads if you need to check them, and they're worth paying mind to. Despite that, I felt that the darkness in this novel was really well balanced. It wasn't overwhelmingly dark, and while a large portion of this novel is focused on Arrah's helplessness in the face of witchdoctors and demons that are much, much more powerful than herself, it doesn't make the novel seem miserable or hopeless. The West-African setting is beautiful, and I loved the city versus tribal comparisons and how the two cultures were blended together, particularly for Arrah who was living between two belief systems, between Heka and the Orishas.

I think it was Arrah herself that I loved the most, though. She's passionate and brave, willing to sacrifice everything over and over if it means that she can do the right thing. Even in the face of some truly horrible losses, she stands back up and keeps fighting. I was mostly expecting the traditional YA trope of a young witch-to-be who doesn't have her magic right up until she needs it where she proves herself to be the chosen one. That didn't happen here, and I loved Arrah all the more for it. Arrah is massively, massively outmatched. Even with risky charlatan magic that could take her life at any moment, she's weak compared to her enemies. But she doesn't care. There's right and there's wrong, and if she's the only one that can do right then she believes she has to, no matter the personal risk. She's a true heroine, fighting past her believable flaws. Her relationship with her mother is powerfully written, and her sorrow at never quite matching up to her expectations is something that I think most young women can relate to. I can't talk in too much detail about the rest of the book, because it's packed with twists that are better if they're truly unexpected, but Arrah is a character I can't wait to read more about. Especially after the way this book ended. The final line gave me chills for a good twelve hours after I finished the book.

All in all, I can't wait for the next part of this series to arrive, and I'm about ready to trade some of my years if it means getting the book just a little bit faster.

ARC received from Netgalley, this had no bearing on my review and all opinions are honest and my own.