In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.

“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

I have a complicated relationship with fantasy. I want to love the genre, but too often I struggle to settle into new worlds, rules, magic systems, and character hierarchies before my patience runs out. That said, the buzz around this book was impossible to ignore. Even at over a thousand pages, I felt compelled to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t hate it. Not even close. There’s actually a lot here that works. But I really struggled with it at times.

The world itself is grim, oppressive, and well realized. Helena Marino is a compelling lead, and I appreciated that the cast stays relatively tight. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by endless names, factions, or lore dumps, which is often what derails me in fantasy. Even though I was admittedly confused for roughly the first quarter of the book, I eventually found my footing. Once the rules became clearer, I was able to settle in and follow the story without constantly flipping back or mentally retracing my steps.

The premise is strong. A once-powerful alchemist reduced to a prisoner with missing memories, surrounded by enemies who don’t quite believe her supposed insignificance, is a solid setup. The tension around what Helena has forgotten and why her memories matter kept me going, especially in the middle stretch of the book where the mystery tightens and the stakes become clearer.
But this is where the length becomes a real issue.

Personally, I don’t think this book needed to be as long as it is. And I don’t say that lightly. There were multiple moments where I genuinely thought the audiobook had glitched and reset because scenes felt so familiar. Not just similar, but they felt repeated in content, tone, and emotional beats. That sense of déjà vu happened more than once, and it seriously disrupted my immersion.

And the repetition isn’t just structural. It’s emotional, too. The dynamic between the two lead characters falls into a loop that I personally found exhausting. The constant back-and-forth of “you’re mine,” “I hate you,” “I love you,” “I shouldn’t want you,” over and over again wore thin fast. I know this trope works for a lot of readers. I am not one of them. Instead of building tension, it flattened it. The monotony made it harder for me to stay emotionally invested.

I mostly listened to this on audio, and while Saskia Maarleveld does a solid job, the production didn’t elevate the material. She captures Helena’s voice well and differentiates the other characters competently, but nothing about the narration stood out. For a book this long, I really think it would have benefitted from multiple narrators or some kind of structural variation to help break up the listening experience. As it stands, the uniform delivery contributed to that feeling of sameness over time.

I completely understand why this book has such a devoted following. The world is dark and immersive, the central mystery is compelling, and the emotional stakes are intense. For readers who love this kind of slow-burn, high-angst fantasy romance, this is probably catnip. Not so much for me. The repetition and sheer length dulled the impact. I found myself wanting tighter editing, sharper pacing, and fewer emotional loops. By the end, I felt more relieved than devastated, which is never quite what I’m hoping for with a story this ambitious.

So yes, I liked parts of it. I didn’t regret reading it. But it tested my patience in ways that kept it from fully clicking. If you thrive on long, immersive fantasy with heavy emotional repetition, you’ll likely have a very different experience than I did.