Title: Sorcery of Thorns
Author: Margaret Rogerson
Genre: Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, body horror, blood, death of parental figures, misogyny, illness, homelessness, grief, forced institutionalization
Back Cover:
All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything.
Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery–magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power.
Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire. Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but the world along with them.
As her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she’s been taught–about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed, and a future she could never have imagined.
Review:
After being surprised by how much I enjoyed Vespertine, I added a couple more of Margaret Rogerson’s books to my reading list. I didn’t have high hopes for this one – the back cover made me think there would be way more romance than I enjoy – but as happened last time, I was wrong. This book is very good.
This book covers a lot of similar tropes to Vespertine. Even though there’s no actual church in this book, the Great Library system acts just enough like one to get that “I grew up believing wholeheartedly believing everything the church says but now that I’ve experienced the real world everything’s much more complicated than I thought and maybe this thing they said was evil actually isn’t” vibe. If that isn’t a relatable deconversion mood, I don’t know what is.
Elisabeth is a perfectly serviceable character. She’s not a great force of personality, but she is a great force of will and stubbornness and determination to do the right thing, even if it turns out the right thing is the thing she’s been told is evil her whole life. Her power is in how much she cares about protecting others and doing the right thing. Well, that and sword fighting, a skill that never really gets explained but I guess I can chalk up to library training. (The “power she never guessed” reveal from the back cover is never built up, an anticlimactic reveal, and completely irrelevant to anything, so I’m not factoring that in.)
I was a little concerned about an enemies-to-lovers romance angle popping up. It did happen (I don’t think it’s a spoiler because if you’re at all familiar with YA fantasy you would know it’s coming), but it was a side plot to all the main plot stop-the-people-attacking-the-libraries happenings. Nathaniel also got to be a character in his own right before he became a love interest, and really, I’m happy with him as a character and the romance overall.
Also, Nathaniel’s demonic servant almost felt like a color-swapped Sebastian from Black Butler – which was a major bonus for me, since Black Butler is my favorite anime of all time.
As far as plots go, it was pretty straightforward. Elisabeth figures out the culprit pretty early, and most of the story is focused on figuring out the why and how so she and Nathaniel can stop him. The why is a big reveal, but only the “how” would count as a twist. But even without a complex plot, it’s quite enjoyable. There’s mystery elements, a heist, semi-sentient books, plenty of magic, and bloody fights (sword- and otherwise) with demonic creatures. It’s not what I would call action-packed, but there’s plenty of action around other engaging and magical stuff.
Sorcery of Thorns is just a little too straightforward to make my Top Favorites list, but it was a great read. It’s magical enough to hold my interest, the motives of the antagonist are difficult to discover without being frustrating, and it has some relatable feelings about the institution you grew up in being wrong, the complex shades of gray between “right” and “wrong,” and how awesome libraries are. Overall, a very good book.
Bluejay Reads 