After reading three American Royals books, and then two non fiction books, Blood Over Bright Haven was my long awaited return to my cozy niche, Fantasy. Recently (ie, the last 3-4 months) I had veered away from the genre because I was burnt out by the barrage of new fantasy names and always jumping into the world and having to learn it. So BoBH was my return.
To start off, I went lynto this book thinking it’s a trilogy or at least had a sequel. This is relevant later on.
The story is fairly… dare I say, generic? Like, if I boiled the plot down to it’s base elements, I would have a hard time finding a difference between this and, say, Tower of Babel, or Ptolemy’s Gate, or various other books. Hell, the reason I read it was because someone pitched this as “Red Rising but a Woman Witch” which isn’t too far from the truth. There are some cool elements, some less cool elements, but the generic plot is simple.
The book starts following people from the wastelands trying to enter a magic city, and being taken by the Blight which has killed many people off in the world. Then we smash cut to 10 years later.
First off, and this is definitely gonna be a *hot* take, but I really enjoyed that the main interpersonal/societal conflict in this book was just basic, old fashioned racism/xenophobia with som, ie e religious undertones sprinkled in. When it comes to fantasy, resonance is important. And I just haven’t felt as strong resonance with a lot of the fantasy I’ve been reading lately. This on the other hand, is just very basic, level 1 diversity conflict, and I had no problems resonating with that.
Second, I know a book has to build up to this, but the “SecRET bEhIND What MagIC ReAlLY IS” was probably the single, most predictable twist of all time. That being said, it is one of the magic building elements I really love. Spoilers (but really rubbing brain cells together based on the snippet of “unravels a secret conspiracy that could change the practice of magic forever” take a guess what the secret is after one chapter), they use the original Fullmetal Alchemist twist, that the energy to do things has a sinister undertone. Gee, I wonder what in the world would be a good source of energy.
Third, I genuinely didn’t predict the ending, only because I thought there was a sequel. That itself is probably a spoiler, but it’s true. The book doesn’t try to capitalize on the world, and just ends it in a position where, everything isn’t burned to the ground, everything isn’t exactly the same, but you get progress.
Fourth, this book obvious is partially a social commentary. It’s hard not to be when your society is based on exploiting literal immigrants for labor. Some people miss that the Scholomance trilogy is partially a commentary on capitalism. Let me be the first to say, you would have to be brain dead not to get the social commentary in this book. Like, it’s not subtle, they bash you over the head with it. It’s commentary on the environmental impact of first world countries, on the exploitation of immigrant labor, and it’s presented with the rest of the society being explicitly ok with it. And on some level, I think the author tries to portray this as incredulous. Like, how could society be ok with killing people to have running water. And then I look outside my window. So yeah, the commentary here is impossible to miss.
There are a few Chekhov‘s guns that I think were loaded but never used. The ‘outside race’ witches, the main character never developing a staff or a wand or learning to spellcast freely. Honestly these were the plot points that when I didn’t see how they’d get resolved in the book, made me think there was a sequel. But no, the payoff is just mystery. Which is good. Not everything needs to be explained explicitly and have a full payoff.
Lastly, the magic system. This was, probably, one of the more interesting and fun magic systems, because in essence, it’s “Code as Magic”. Like, the way they cast a spell is they type up the most basic Python Code and run it using energy magic.Like,
“Declare: BOOK as object with leather cover and paper in between with ink, sized 11×8, weighing 2 pounds, and located on the desk in front of me.
Move BOOK 2 units to the right.
End”
Quite honestly, it is a fun system. It’s a pity they don’t explore it more, or have a payoff where the outsider race utilizes their thinking to develop a new language for magic/code. What a world we could have if the python Magicians faced up against the Ruby on Rails magicians.
All my “complaints” aside, this was genuinely a fun read. I managed to plow through it in a few days, and not once did I feel like it was a slog to read. 10/10 would recommend to anyone else.