syllareads's Reviews (951)

I am unsure of what to say exactly because there are no words in this language or another to describe my love for this book. 5/5 stars isn't enough, not nearly enough, I need to give this book 10/5, 100/5, I have never felt so swept away by a world so vast and unconquerable as A Memory Called Empire presents it to us.

Nothing I could ever write does justice to the way Arkady Martine has spun a political intrigue, a budding friendship or perhaps more and the inevitable loss of self in the jaws of a giant Empire set to annex your entire world as you know it as you find yourself falling deeper and deeper in love with the destructive force of your oppressor. I won't even attempt to try, to be honest; I just need you all to read this book. It's brilliant, it's scorching, and painful, its prose as elegant as the citizens of Teixcalaan are in their poetry, and I have never fallen in love so swiftly, nor ever felt the deep regret that comes with loving something so intent on swallowing you whole.

I am in love with this book, and I cannot even find the right words for it.

This Review is not spoiler-free! If you do not want to get some slight information on how the characters and their journey utterly DELIGHTED me, please don't read it and instead, go find the book somewhere to enjoy it!

So! With that disclaimer aside, let's jump right into my review of this lovely book~

Short version: I love this???

Slightly longer version: I thought I would simply enjoy it as a nice palate-cleanser in between larger SF/F Adult novels but I got past a certain point and suddenly found I couldn't put the book down - and while I'm not 1000% on board with it, I still fell in love with both the book itself and its main characters and now I can't stop thinking about them help

And now to the actual, possibly more coherent review:

Sorcery of Thorns is a stand-alone YA fantasy novel (which surprised me, given that I am much more used to reading series with at least two books when it comes to YA fantasy) with a fast-paced, action-packed plot, sympathetic characters, casual LGBT+ rep, and a main character who fights demons (or, as the book calls this particular breed of demons, fiends) off with an iron crowbar, a lot of feisty determination and probably a good amount of sheer luck. The plot itself felt a tiny bit rushed sometimes (this is reason #1 why I distracted a few points from the overall rating) and would have easily filled a trilogy with its three major events as turning points for each book, BUT the Margaret Rogerson managed to still come to a fulfilling conclusion while giving the plot enough (if very carefully measured) time to do its thing.

The Characters:

Elizabeth Scrivener, local feral librarian, and booklover, intent on becoming a warden to protect high-level grimoires from turning into Maleficts or getting into the hand of greedy sorcerers, grew up in one of the big libraries her country has to offer. Reason number one to love her: she adores books with all her being ("Why wouldn't I love [this room]? It has books in it!" is an actual quote - from me, or the heroine of this book? The answer is, both), something that is both remarked upon more than once and gets brought up simply by how she acts around books and places holding them. Apart from that, she's also a pure delight with her witty, snarky banter with her friends, her love interest, and an all-powerful demon, and she packs a powerful punch or two, especially later in the series. Her compassion for books (and sometimes other people) is however still the thing that made me fall in love with this particular lady and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Nathaniel Thorn, local resident reclusive sorcerer, and disaster bi boy is the last living member of the Thorn family, an old lineage of sorcerers most known for their necromancy. His first meeting with Elizabeth goes well (she accidentally almost drops a bookshelf on him. Ah, yes....love), but it's nothing compared to his second: he gets tasked to escort her to the capital to be brought in for questioning (she might have, in need for a better solution while fighting for her life, destroyed a grimoire gone bad, which was not something the sorcerer-community appreciated). On the long way there she manages to bite him once, almost run away twice, and throws a fire poker at her magicked trunk, believing it to be him - naturally, this does not exactly endear her to him. By the end of the book, however, his complaints about her incorrigible, wild nature have melted into endearing pet names and quite possibly open adoration, so suffice to say, he comes around (and so does Elizabeth, which might actually be the bigger surprise, considering she has been raised to hate sorcerers with all her being and believed he was about to kill her on their journey to the capital - but then again, who can resist a lonely young man engaging you in sarcastic banter while also being surprisingly ready to protect you at a moment's notice?)

Silas, our third most noticeable character, was an utter delight. One of the aforementioned demons (though not a fiend - he's instead one of the more powerful ones, summoned to serve a sorcerer family by demanding a piece off their lifetime in exchange for granting them the possibility to harness magical powers from the Otherworld), he totters on the fine line between "will not hesitate to tear your heart out with his claws" and "might actually hesitate because his fingers will get dirty and also perhaps he has some feelings in that stone-cold heart of his, oh no". His relationship with Nathaniel and later Elizabeth delighted me more than I can possibly tell, his quiet nature mixed in with his obvious and bloodthirsty otherness was perfection, and his later shown devotion to his master and Elizabeth actually made me cry (I did not expect to cry! Why did this book make me cry! How rude---).

Katrien, friends with feral librarian apprentices, socially awkward wizards, and demons with impeccable manners, didn't have as much screentime as the other aforementioned disaster trio, but I still loved her for the amount of time we had with her. One of Elizabeth's only friends at the library, she doesn't hesitate to use magic to communicate with her (even though the use of such magic is forbidden), schemes with all three of these bastards to overthrow one of the most powerful magicians adored by the public (also forbidden, possibly) while having to be very careful about not getting caught, since the new Director of her and Elizabeth's old library is a vile piece of shit and likes to abuse his power whenever possible. The fact that her politeness is, to Elizabeth at least, usually a sign of her thinking about a thousand ways to fuck someone up, is just another mark in her favor! Since there is a throw-away line about her not being interested in anyone romantically, I headcanon her as Aro, if not AroAce, another fact that utterly delighted me.

The Plot

As mentioned before, the plot itself isn't trying to invent anything new - Elizabeth wants to become a warden, but when her mentor, the former Director of her library, dies during an attack and a Malefict (a grimoire gone bad, usually due to it being damaged in any way) escapes only to be struck down by Elizabeth through sheer luck and determination, she gets sent off to the capital for a hearing in front of the magical community. Upon her arrival, she and Nathaniel Thorn accidentally team up against a bunch of fiends, earning her a far better reputation in the public's eye, and gaining her access to one of the most influential sorcerer's mansion. This does, in fact, not bode well though, because Elizabeth finds out that said sorcerer, Oberon Ashcroft, is not only a misogynistic piece of shit but also responsible for the attacks on every library which had a Malefict going out of control. Trying to entangle this controversy while also having to survive being called mad, drugged through magic, and almost shipped off to a madhouse, Elizabeth finds an ally in, surprisingly for her, Nathaniel (and subsequently Silas), who is the first to believe her about her experiences in Ashcroft Manor. The three of them, plus Katrien providing information through a magical mirror Elizabeth finds, again, through sheer luck and also possibly two feral books fighting with each other, set off to get rid of the man which is what more than three-quarters of the book talks about.

Overall, Rogerson takes a well-known premise and works with it. I have no doubt that the reason I loved this book so much after initially just thinking I'd mildly enjoy myself is the way the characters are written and work with each other. There's so much chemistry between them, their personalities work so well with each other, and they're just really, really funny in a disastrous way that made me almost hit my head on the book multiple times.

Anything else I loved?

Why, yes! Glad you asked.
The book shows multiple times that a lot of problems could have been avoided if people in power just listened for once. Many of the influential sorcerer families shown somewhere could have helped our heroine and Nathaniel if they had believed Elizabeth about Ashcroft. Later on in the book, another one of the great libraries almost gets destroyed because its Director is unwilling to listen to a "tainted" Elizabeth since she's now affiliated with a sorcerer (namely, our bisaster boi Nathaniel). Generally, the book tackles the theme "Man should have listened to Woman but instead dismisses her claims as hysteria due to reading too many books (I wish I was kidding)" with Elizabeth's story really well - which might make it a bit uncomfortable to read for some people.
The realistic portrayal of ugly grieving and how emotions can generally manifest even in situations that are positive enough also made my heart clench a few times. Nathaniel is the obvious character for this, as he lost his entire family years before the incidents in the book and still has nightmares from that particular night, turning him into a social reclusive as his nightmares often make his magic spiral out of control. Elizabeth later on in the book has a panic attack because she can't handle being perceived in a positive light again after so long being shunned and dismissed as outright mad. Both instances were heartwrenching!

Anything else I didn't like?

As mentioned before, I would have loved more than one book! Don't get me wrong, the story still works, as I said, but I'm personally just a bigger fan of large series and more content? Sign me UP. Rogerson made it work (somehow? I actually don't know how, there was so much going on and yet it felt fine, what is this sorcery (pun intended)) but the book could have been split fairly easily which would have made some moments possibly more impactful! This is a very small complaint in the grand scheme of things though.

Number two is yet another personal thing: I wasn't the biggest fan of the writing. It worked well, and the dialogue was actually beautiful (I might have sent a friend numerous DMs from Elizabeth's and Nathaniel's banter alone) but some descriptions were too on-the-nose for me to work properly, and since I'm also generally a HUGE fan of purple prose (which is not what this book delivers), I was a bit biased from the start already. Again, it worked well for the book, it's merely reason #2 why this book didn't get 5 stars from me!


Overall: I am so glad I picked this book up! It was a blast, filled with a lot of humor and some great action scenes. 9.5/10, would read again just to get my favourite disasters back on the page (also, I feel like I need to mention this, but Silas? Nathaniel has two hands, please take one of them, thank you very much---)

So I am not entirely sure what to think of this book... the rating is very careful because I did enjoy some of its aspects, and yet others left me entirely confused.

The Good Parts

We are yet again following a few of the characters from book one, and since I like the majority of them (or at least found them somewhat intriguing) I am completely fine with that. We gain a few more major spots where the story takes place since Esta and Harte managed to leave New York (which, for the first time because of The Brink, takes us out of the city through some of its main characters) and the author makes a point of addressing some of the problems running rampant in America in the 1900s.

Some of the new characters or new perspectives we gained were also fairly intriguing! I liked Cela a lot, she's a sweetheart who can and will get her way one way or the other (and I respect that), and Ruby was an interesting new character to join the POV gang as well. I'd like to see more of those two in the next book. Viola also had more than one chapter dedicated to her POV which I appreciated because I fell for our hot-headed Italian lady the second she got introduced, basically.

As always, Maxwell's writing is evocative and beautiful and (sadly) one of the main reasons I got through this book as fast as I did - because I just couldn't stop!

The Not-So-Good Parts

Oh boy... where to begin.

The plot was even more convoluted than in the first book. Not only do we have

two timelines to follow, as Esta accidentally rips herself and Harte out of America in 1902 into America in 1904, a jump that not all characters go through

, this book also introduced a big mess of a plotline to follow. The different POVs were nicely done and arranged and it was fairly easy to determine which of the characters we were looking at at the moment, but the plot itself moved far too fast in some places, and exceedingly slow in others. Every character was so vague about their motivation even when it was their turn as a POV character that I found it hard to understand where the book was headed. Motivations got mixed up, tangled (and not in a good way for me), and shoved together, only for the actual climax of the book to be completely different from what I thought it was supposed to be leading towards. 

A very small, personal gripe I have with the book is that Esta's worries about

screwing up her own timeline by not being sent to the future/changing up too many things in the past/not being able to return to the past because she got never sent to the future seemed to change every single chapter or so. She's already screwing with the timeline by simply being in the past and doing things she's probably not supposed to do! Why is she only worried about it in certain instances - she's basically already created some sort of alternate future universe from the one she remembers. It made the entire thing about the time-travel seem not very well thought-out for me

All in all: it's not a bad book, and the writing made a few things better for me (because I am, after all, a hoe for good writing and I will never be biased about this at all) but overall, I wouldn't exactly recommend this book for a lot of people. It seems not exactly well thought through and the convoluted plotlines, mixed with a lot of POV characters and their own intentions hidden from the reader even while being the one to lead the chapter, made it worse.

This relatively short book contains two stories by V.E. Schwab, both of which I found beautiful and heartwrenching at once.

The Near Witch
Main story in this short collection, The Near Witch is about 300 pages long - 300 pages of wild beauty, loss, hatred and, in the end, a young girl who listens to her heart and her father's stories and the moor around her instead of frightened voices from her own village.

I found the story both fantastical, with witches made from wind and earth, witches singing children out of bed, and realistic in the way that I recognized the way Lexi is held back by her own family even though she is just as capable, if not more so, than the men around her. I recognized things from the real world, from my own world, in the way the people of Near lashed out against an innocent rather than believe a single young girl, the quiet but resolute way in which the women of Near resist the fear in the end, helping Lexi in every way they can, quietly, secretly, but helpful nonetheless.

V.E. Schwab's writing captures all of this, and the supernatural elements of the plot, as well as I expected it to, and I'm thoroughly grateful to have read this beautiful piece.

The Ash-Born Boy
This far shorter piece is heart-wrenching within just a few pages and tells Cole's story with few words but even more emotions. I wasn't expecting for it to make me cry! But it did, and tore my heart out in the process. Schwab's words capture the boy and his tragic fate, his guilt and his pain so well I couldn't turn my eyes away from it even for a second.


In short: I loved it. I loved it and loved it, and would read it again in a heartbeat.

This book is a beautiful tale spun by a masterful storyteller, intent on dragging us into the world she created - and I loved it.

I already remarked on this outside of this review, but the entire story, aided by the first-person narration, feels like a story being told to us - this might sound strange, so let me explain: to me, it felt like I was both living Tarisai's experiences while also hearing her tell us of her magnificent journey. The theme of a story being told is present in the entire book, just as much as music - often, parts of the story and the clues Tarisai needs to get through her adventures are told in song. 

(I'm also very thankful that the author included a list of ways to pronounce a lot of important names for both people and places in the back! I appreciated and needed it a lot and I found myself going back to it every now and then to check whether or not I was imagining the right sounds in my head while reading this beautiful book)

I can only HIGHLY recommend this book and will breathlessly wait for its sequel!