Much to my delight as a reader, I find myself in an era of stories that combine history-evoking settings (“big skirts”), fascinating systems of magic, and women who are powerful in deep and unexpected ways. The Women’s War (Jenna Glass) and The Midnight Bargain (C.L. Polk) are two recent examples. The newest addition is a complex tale marked by superb characters and intricate, well-thought-out world-building in a world that resembles Renaissance Venice. My introduction to the book was the guest appearance of the authors, Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, on Juliette Wade’s program, Dive into World Building, in which they discussed the tarot-like system of divination cards. That would be enough for an ordinary fantasy, but here it’s only a small part of the whole: political history and current power struggles, magical systems and curses, poisons and hallucinogenic drugs, a long con, simmering revenge, and a generation-spanning Robin Hood-like cult figure. Friendships and feuds, masquerades within masquerades, romance in every sense of the word, and most of all, a heroine who is at once conflicted, determined, vulnerable, and resourceful. There are occasional echoes of Dickens’s London, as well as other, familiar worlds, but the whole is fresh and original, a page-turner that left me hungry for more. It's long, and this is a very good thing.
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