Kate Elliott's Servant Mage is a 170 page novella that focus on a woman named Fellian. Fellian is the daughter of parents who were executed for wanting to help out others. She was later sent to an asylum where she was brainwashed into following the laws of the Liberationists. Fellian herself is a Lamplighter, able to provide illumination through magic. Her magic is not common place.

When an aether Adept named Shey shows up claiming to be searching for something that was allegedly eliminated from the servants asylum in Alabaster City, Fellian is pulled into a political conspiracy against her will by a man once known as Jojen, the Wolf, who is fighting against the Liberationists and August Protector who once dethroned the Monarchists.

They also need her help rescuing trapped compatriots from an underground complex of mines. As a background, all members of the royal family were executed 30 years ago. No royal child of the dragon lineage has been born in the years since. Dragon-born children still fall into this world, even if the August Protector has vowed to rid the land of the last of them. You're asking yourselves what? Dragon-born children are born because there are rifts between the land and the aether that allows elementals to take root.

Some call them demon-wraiths, others call them soul-wraiths. Some people are born with a soul-wraith bound into their bones as a slumbering elemental of earth, water, air, fire, and aether. The dragon born are rare because they alone have all five elements bound into them. Were it not for oracles, Fellian would have lived a normal life, and not been sent to the asylum. But non of that matters. All Fellian wants is travel papers, cash, and to be brought close enough to her home area that she could realistically reach her home.

Their quest is fast-paced, all-encompassing, and violent, with shocking moments—including a graphic infanticide—showing the brutality of this world and its inhabitants’ desperate fight for power. In limited space, Elliott builds a refreshingly complex world with a magic system not linked to familial lineage and with realistically thorny politics, as neither the Liberationists nor the Monarchists are depicted as infallibly good for the people.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other part of the group called a five-arrow quiver; Haolu, earth mage and Invi, air mage. I would also be remiss to say that this book ends on a hanging Chad, which if you live in Florida, you know what I'm referring to. We're not sure what the author intended by introducing these characters and not continue as part of a more in-depth series.

I haven't read Kate Elliott before and this was a really interesting world and ideas, though I think it could have been better fully fleshed out as a novel. I think this does a nice job setting up two opposing sides- and that actually we, as the average person, have the right to choose neither of them. The novella really sets the standard good and evil on its head, since neither side is blameless and it's the people that suffer under both. I will definitely pick up another of Elliott's books in future, as the writing was very good and the story flew by.

A servant mage whose ability is to control fire ends up being involved in a mission to help a group of rebels rescue some people who are trapped in a mine. But along the way they discover the birth of a child that could change everything for the Monarchists….

First of all, one of the reasons I chose to read this book was because it was shelved as LGTB/queer. I don’t just read LGBT fiction, but in this case I wanted to read a queer fantasy novella to review it in my sapphic bookstagram. However, the queerness in this book is mostly implied and not specified directly. While we could say the main character is bisexual, she actually doesn’t mention her attraction towards women (not as clearly as towards one male character) and there isn’t really any romance in the novel. When I finished reading I was slightly disappointed because of this but it hasn’t affected my general opinion of the book.

On the one hand, there were some things that I really liked and enjoyed about the book:
• There’s a fully realized magic system. It has some classical fantasy elements but it goes a bit further, bringing new ideas into play.
• The world-building was quite complex and developed.
• The characters, especially Fellian, were well-written.
• The ending. I don’t want to say much about this but Fellian proves that she’s more than what she seems at first.

On the other hand, however, there were some things that I disliked or didn’t connect with:
• The pace: for such a short book it often felt slow and uneventful
• The writing style: at times it felt like the writing was unnecessarily overembellished.
• The plot and subplots: I thought the plot related to the child was way more interesting than the supposedly main plot of saving the people from the mines.

In general I think this wasn’t a bad read, but it also wasn’t an excellent one. Nevertheless, I will probably give the author a new opportunity by reading some of her other books in the future.

2.5⭐ / 5⭐
Rep: LG(B)T – Bisexual main character

Servant Mage is a nice little novella by Kate Elliott that I read (in ARC form) last year on a plane. I needed something to tide me over for my three-hour flight, and I ended up reading the entire story in a single sitting. When I got to the end, despite feeling engaged the entire time, I found myself thinking that something was missing. The concept was unique, and the messaging was very clear, but in the end, the story felt limited by the medium and a bad fit for a novella.

Fellian is a Lamplighter, a mage with a magical affinity for fire. In a world where people control different forms of elemental magic, the gathering of mages is strictly forbidden due to the potential to create rebel groups that might challenge authority. Fellian is someone who really just wants to be left alone and stay out of political movements, which is why it's a bummer that a group of rebel Monarchists free her from indentured servitude and take her on a journey to rescue trapped compatriots from an underground complex of mines. Thus begins a heist/rescue mission set within a fascinating world with a memorable gang of elemental mages that has extreme promise but ultimately feels greatly underdeveloped.

The real body in the well here is the fact that this book feels like a large standalone novel the size of The Priory of the Orange Tree (giant) with 3/4ths of its pages ripped out. Kate Elliott is a master of worldbuilding and character design. Each of the mages in Fellian’s crew feels unique and mysterious with their own cool thing, but because of the short length of the story, everything ends up feeling massively underdeveloped simply because we don’t have the time to dig into it - not because the information isn’t there. The novella feels underdeveloped, incomplete, and I can’t think of why the novella format was chosen.

The core idea of the novella is definitely interesting, but I can’t actually talk about it because if I tell you, I’d spoil the one thing the short story has going for it: the execution of the theme. In some ways, Servant Mage feels like over-committing to a bit. A punchline that would have been great with less setup is lost because of the huge setup. Alternatively, the ending would have been fabulous if there had been more going on in the story as a whole so that I didn’t feel like I just spent three hours reading the equivalent of “wouldn’t it be interesting if a person did X?”

Servant Mage isn’t bad, but it is nowhere near as good as I have come to expect from Elliott from reading her other work like Unconquerable Sun. Mage has an interesting idea with a lot of potential, but the execution is simply not there.

Rating: Servant Mage - 6.0/10
-Andrew

A very beautiful story of magic and where you belong. The mc had a very hard childhood, and has the opportunity to escape and do something good for the world. But who is to say what is good and what's not? She has doubts but for the freedom she follows this group of people, each with a different magical power than hers, to save a newborn who can change the world as they know it.
I would've loved the ending being a little bit longer. It felt unfinished, and not because it was short, like something was missing. I wanted to know more about a lot of things.
Either way I really liked this novella and the writing style plus world built were both done really well.

In a recent interview at Before We Go Blog, Ken Liu mentions Kate Elliott as one of the very best fantasy writers of today and Servant Mage, this gem of a short novel, reveals Elliott as a master story-teller. Servant Mage tells the story of a young woman raised in servitude and taught to despise and suppress her greatest strengths, who learns to overcome the internalized negative beliefs and become who she truly is.

Her name is Fellian, and there is never much doubt about her irrepressible nature, her refusal to curb her tongue or to bow to those described as her betters. Born into a medieval-like world torn by conflict between the ruling Liberationists and the defeated Monarchists, Fellian is ill at ease with both sides. Her parents were farmers, killed for their beliefs, not ardent advocates of these two ruling classes. She clings to their memory and where she came from despite depending so heavily for survival, first, on the servant role imposed by the Liberationists, and, later, on her rescue from that limited life of servitude by the Monarchist mages she travels with for most of the novel.

We quickly learn that Fellian has a special power. Born with a fire wraith in her bones, she can shape lamps and lights of various kinds. Her Liberationist masters taught her that such wraiths were demons that had to be rigidly controlled, and they have made her a lowly servant working at an inn. She’s learned never to expect any more of her life.

But one day she is visited by a stranger who claims to have special authorization to take her on a journey that will result in her freedom from servitude. She accepts the offer and soon finds herself at the center of a group of mages of the Monarchist faction. But she takes nothing at face value and bombards them with what they regard as impertinent questions to get at the truth. First she sees them take off the disguises of clothing they’ve used to fool the guards at the inn where Fellian is a servant. Then she learns the specific power these other mages have. One is a water adept, one an air mage, another was born with an earth wraith in her bones, and their leader is a master of aether. Unmasking is the unifying theme of the story – of physical disguises, of false ideologies, of the truth of personal worth.
......
After building a fairly complex world, the shortness of Servant Mage does leave me wanting to know more about Fellian and the outcome of the struggle she takes part in. I have no idea if this is the first novel in a series, but I do hope it is. It’s a marvelous adventure, brilliantly written, with fast-paced action and an unforgettable central character. More, please!

What’s not to love?

The novella “The Servant Mage” is a delight. This is the first Kate Elliott story I’ve read, and I’m hooked on her writing style, her storytelling, her world building, character development, her magic system. Just about everything.

Because this is a novella, I won’t say much about the story because I’m aiming for a spoiler free review.
Fellian, the protagonist, is a servant mage whose magic creates light, and against her will, she becomes embroiled in a complex conspiracy and cannot go back to her old life and must cooperate.

She is strong, pragmatic, caring, and focused. The character are so compelling, I couldn't put the book down. The color gray describes most of the characters; there are no clear good guys and bad guys. The political world is complex, and Fellian is clear-eyed about politics and her goals. As in life, each side believes they are right.

The world feels real, gritty, and dangerous. Add to that magic, politics, organized zealots, and a woman’s journey from virtual slavery to something else. A bonus is humor—the tongue-in-cheek kind I like.

This novella creates an intriguing world, characters, magic system, and political unrest. I tried to discover if “Servant Mage” is the beginning of a series, but couldn’t confirm my guess. However, the ending opens up possible new storylines, and I want more.

One caveat, as I’ve mentioned, the story is short, but Elliot packs a lot into a brief space. There’s no fluff or meandering. If this is a series, I’m hoping for longer, more epic stories.

If short and open-ended stories aren’t your thing, this may frustrate you. Although the description stated novella, I guess I skipped that detail, so it surprised me when it ended. I got over it because I love this characters and story.

If those things don’t bother you, I’d say, give this book a try.

Servant Mage is a look into the idea that maybe sometimes serving one side of the cause, and the other only proves one thing: That sometimes fighting for a cause is merely serving the cause of others. And those higher-ups that control and manipulate the force in power vs the force in opposition are merely playing both sides. Controlling, manipulating, and outsourcing information that the people, i.e the peasants, the public whatever name you can call them will never know. I like this smart commentary that this book takes. It's a very apt understanding. This is because Fellian comes to recognise that the entire fight between the Monarchists and the Liberationists lead to no good outcome.

Like there is a balance between Good and Evil, each side is convinced that their cause is righteous. It is in these moments when you take a step away from the conflict to examine both viewpoints that you realise this is a morally grey situation. One side does evil at the expense of claiming to be good. The other does well at the expense of claiming to be evil (it could happen) This has many historical comparisons. I love that this book is a philosophical debate in my opinion. I really enjoyed the book, the way it was written and the way it was paced. It does keep you engaged. That being said, I think some simpler definitions of the afterlife and a little less on the concepts would have made the story even better.

Fellian interacts with a lot of well-rounded characters that do enhance her personality. But I often feel they come up as more to counter her personality alone, rather than compliment it. In book 2, I would prefer that the characters have more of their own goals rather than trying to guide her too much. Because while we get a sense of her personality emerging, it's not rounded enough. But this is something that happens in fantasy books in a trilogy, in the first book, your character isn't going to be superb at everything. It's okay to take a step back. Fellian is, however, smart enough to realise how the situation plays around her and uses it to her advantage. But I want more of her personality is what I'm saying at the end.

This was a very well written novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you to Tor/Macmillian Forge for allowing me to review this. All thoughts are my opinion only.

Interesting read. Has a lot of potential should the world be expanded (which I hope it does). 3 stars because it was too quick of a read for such an expansive storyline and worldbuilding.

Servant Mage was such an interesting story. I found myself really drawn to the characters and the world Elliot creates. But, I feel like this book just scratched the surface and left me needing a bit more.

This book is short, especially for a fantasy novel. I didn't mind the length, but I feel like because it was shorter, the story moved a little too fast at times. There wasn't as much character development or world building. I got glimpses of those and I liked what I saw, but I would have liked more.

The world building that was present made me really intrigued. I'm looking forward to learning more about this world and how magic plays a part. There is so much to learn about and explore! I feel the same about the characters. I got to know them well enough to feel interested in their story, and what I did see really drew me in.

While I wish there had been a little more to this book, I did still enjoy it quite a bit! I wish this wasn't a standalone, because I'd love so much more!

I really enjoyed this book. The pacing was spot on, and I loved the character's depths and how they interacted with everyone. It was such a fast, fun read, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get lost in a great story for a while! This is one of my favorites, and one of the best books I read in 2021!

I'll be the first to admit that the thing that drew me in the most when I first heard about this book was the cover. I have a thing for dragons, and it is sadly *very* easy to entice me to read a book - just have a dragon on the cover.
So, did the book live up to the cover? Sadly for me it did not.
In this short story, we follow a Lamplighter (a person with fire magic), a servant who is rescued from her indenture to help the rebels. I have read this storyline a thousand times before and it seemed predictable enough for me, so I was pleasantly surprised to read an ending that circumvented my expectations.
As far as the characters are concerned, I really wanted to slap the main character a few times so that should tell you how I felt through most of the book. But my main complaint really was that the book was too short. While the magic system was interesting, there were a lot of things that could have benefited from a longer book, like character development. I was, weirdly, completely detached from all the characters in the book and couldn't care less about their journey.
Also, a severe lack of fireball-holding dragons didn't make me rethink my generous 3 stars at all.

The world-building was really interesting though, and I hope the author chooses to write a longer novel next time around!


(Review link on IG to follow soon)

Fellian works as an indentured servant for a tavern, where she is expected to use her gift – the ability to create light through magic. One day a group of soldiers arrive, and make her an offer: come and fight for the rebels, and they’ll free her.

It’s interesting that Fellian doesn’t just jump at the chance. For once, this isn’t a fantasy adventure entered into lightly, as she weighs up the offer and chance of severe punishment against the unpleasant but relatively quiet life she has. This struck such a nerve with me: jobs and homes and friendships stayed in too long, awful but known.

The rest of this short book follows the course of a day or two as Fellian is given a crash course in the rebellion, the lies of the current rulers, and many of the things kept from her about the magic she and her new companions wield. It’s impressive how much world building is done and/or hinted at in such a short space, plus a gripping slice of action.

However, my one complaint would be the length – I want more! A trilogy of big thick volumes could surely be spun in this world, and my fingers are crossed…!

I’m going to start this review off by saying that I have a soft spot for Kate Elliot. The Crown of Stars Series is some great reading if I do say so myself. That being said this book was not my favorite.

Fellian is a servant mage. A sort of indentured servant who is taken from her family and only taught the most basic of magic skills so as to be of use to the person who purchases her for work. When we first meet Fellian, she is engaged in an illegal activity, teaching someone how to read. When she is approached by those who appear to be soldiers, she knows her life will never be the same.

Fellian is swept away on an adventure knowing nothing about what’s happening, as a result, you as a reader know nothing about what’s going on as well. We learn as Fellian learns. And I found myself as frustrated as Fellian was by the little bits and pieces that she was being fed.

The other characters weren’t particularly compelling. This could be partly because of how Fellian sees them, but I feel they might have been more interesting if I felt any of the urgency towards saving them that she did.

I did find the magic system fascinating. It is elemental based, but not the same way we have seen in the past. For example, Fellian is a fire mage, she can create Lamps of light to guide the way, and Water mages can change their appearance. I enjoyed that each mage had a part to play, but I wish the gifts they possessed had been explored a little more.

Part of my issue with this book is because it is a novella. I found the plot to be interesting, but it could have benefited from some more fleshed-out world-building. What we do see of the world is intriguing, but not enough to hold my attention (full disclosure, I had COVID and COVID fog is real, but that wasn’t the full issue) for very long.

The ending was interesting. It was predictable, but not, all at the same time. You knew what was going to happen, but the reasons why were left a mystery until the very end.

After all was said and done, I had to give this book two stars.

Another cracking tale from Kate Elliott - my only sadness was that I didn't realise it was a novella so the adventure was over all too quickly.
Fellian is a mage known as a lamplighter - who can create light from small lamps to large scale illumination. She lives in a world where the monarchy has been overthrown and governance replaced by an independant, socialist orientated group. This group deemed mages to be a necessary evil so all children are tested for mage affinities. Any who have mage gifts are taken from their families, kept in isolated camps and then sent out as indentured servants to benfit the greater populace.
Fellian has been indentured to an inn but quietly rebels by teaching reading & writing to those who desire it. She dreams of escape and one day this is made real when monarchist rebels who need her skills rescue/kidnap her. Reluctantly Fellian agrees to help but the rescue is not quite what it might seem, as the monarchists have a hierachical structure as limiting as that enforces by the new regime.
I really enjoyed this story but left me wanting more - it is definitely a seed for a larger story and only time will tell if this comes to pass.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this ARC. All opinions are my own.

It's an epic fantasy in a novella format, fast paced and entertaining.
I liked it but I think it felt a bit underdeveloped as there were all the elements for a series.
The author is a talented storyteller and the plot flows. The world building is based on a lot of classic fantasy tropes as the characters.
I had fun and it's recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This was a very quick fantasy story that follows Fellian, a servant mage. This book was very short and I definitely think it would have benefitted from a longer book. I felt because of it's length the world building came mainly through dialogue which leaves a lot of questions. I still enjoyed the overall arc of the story and some of the characters we meet. I look forward to trying another Kate Elliot book in the future!
Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review!

My Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐/ 5 stars

This is a short fantasy novella (about 176 pages) about Fellian, a Lamplighter (fire mage) who has been kept in a life of servitude and was rescued by Monarchist sympathizers to rescue other members that are trapped. There is also a royal child that is born of natural phenomenons/disasters that is being killed and they need to rescue this baby too.

The world building is great, but the story is so short that I could not truly be immersed. This absolutely deserved a full duology at the very least to really explore this world that Elliot created. This reminded me a little of the Grisha books and An Ember in the Ashes series - but without the “oomph” that made those stories so special. Overall, I think it was ok, but didn’t love it.

Thank you to Macmillan/Tor Books for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

Final review: 2.5/5 Stars
When the Liberationists overthrew the monarchy, all mages were rounded up and conscripted into indentured service to the state. Fellian is one such mage, torn from her family five years ago, forced to work as a servant at an inn, cleaning latrines and using her fire gift to light the lamps every night. But one night, Fellian is whisked away by a group of rebel Monarchists who desperately need her fire gift to rescue allies. But all that gets put aside when a catastrophic event reveals that a child of royal blood has been born. It will take a mage from all five domains to rescue the child, and Fellian is the only one they’ve got.

SERVANT MAGE is a novella with a fascinating set-up that is hampered by its execution. The author has a great premise: a mage trapped between two warring factions who simply wants to return to the home she was stolen from years ago. Along the way, she begins to understand both her own powers, and the political powers shaping the world. Fellian is meant to be our POV character; after being conscripted as a young teen, she was kept isolated and uneducated about how magic works so that she would be easier to control, so she’s learning a lot as she experiences freedom for the first time in years.

But the result is a lot of info-dumping that feels rushed and a bit stilted. Some of this can be forgiven at the book’s start as the necessary evil of needing to quickly immerse readers into this world. But exposition of all sorts continues well into the books final act, with Fellian constantly asking questions that her companions point out are rude and awkward, even as they answer the question.

To give credit where it’s due, the book does an excellent job of making the point that both sides of this conflict are the same side of an oppressive coin, a realization that slowly becomes more and more clear until one final impactful moment at the end of the book. Both sides want to create a privileged ruling class, they just differ on who should be allowed in those upper ranks. This lack of a “good” side does make the story a bit bleak overall, which can be a bit jarring if you came to this tale for a rousing adventure where Fellian is rescued by rebels looking to create a better future. The story does end on a hopeful note, but it is much more of a grey tale than you might initially expect.

There’s enough in SERVANT MAGE that I held out hope for a long while that I was going to like it more than I ended up doing. Unfortunately, I had trouble connecting with the characters, particularly lead character Fellian. This feels like a book that would have benefited from being a novel length, with time to explore all these concepts more naturally. As it currently stands, SERVANT MAGE is a premise that fell just short of winning my heart.

[Originally postedon Tor.Com: https://www.tor.com/2022/01/18/book-reviews-servant-mage-by-kate-elliott]

Kate Elliott’s Servant Mage Is a Remarkable Political Drama Slipped Between Interplanar Travel and Dragon Babies

So many fantasy books imagine the downfall of a corrupt, oppressive, monarchist empire. Servant Mage, a slim novella by SFF luminary Kate Elliott, is a book that asks: What then? What happens after the revolution? What happens to the noble class when their system of power falls, when the populace is trapped in the dictatorship of the proletariat in between the past and something better?

Servant Mage follows Fellian, a magician with an affinity for fire and light-magic, as she’s recruited (more like press-ganged) to help guide a rescue team through the caved-in mine. Halfway into the trek across the country, her rebel group receives word of an emergency—a five-souled child has been born, and the baby must be rescued before the Liberationists find and kill her.

What follows is a magical heist story mired in politics, power, and the shape of truth. Fellian comes face to face with the lies that the current Liberationist regime has fed her for years, including the truth about the source of magic in the world. As rebel nobles and near-Marxists battle for cultural supremacy, Fellian struggles to discern right from wrong, swept up in a struggle that is far more complicated and entangled than she had ever assumed.

Fellian is much less an agent of this story and much more a vehicle for Elliott to shape a world that is fantastic, expansive, and worthy of many more pages than the slim 160 that make up this novella. That’s not to say that Fellian doesn’t have character or doesn’t make some choices, but overall the plot happens around her. For a book this size, with a wonderful amount of lore and worldbuilding, propelled by non-stop action, this isn’t a deterrent. Fellian is a smart character, her voice sharp and hopeful, and Elliott uses Fellian’s just-barely-an-outsider status to pry apart the insecurities and cracks that make up the world of Servant Mage.

The book delineates two major political factions: the Liberationists, who are in power at the start of the novel, and the monarchists, who are attempting to find five-souled children in order to help them reclaim their authority. It isn’t easy to figure out which side is better or worse, and it’s clearly intentional. The moves Servant Mage makes in every single conversation, worldbuilding detail, and plot reveal, only serve to muddy the perspectives. It’s brilliantly done, and the immersion into the world is immediate.

In Servant Mage we get a world that is flawed and fractured, but in a way that feels devastatingly real. There is no black and white righteousness. Under the yoke of control, the number of people who suffer are always greater than those who thrive, even as the Liberationists state their goals are to create total social equality. But the dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t quite working. The just-off-real world political ideologies at the core of this book are its lodestone, the grounding point of the plot, deftly couched amid a fantastic turmoil, full of soul-bound elemental wraiths, cows who eat demons, and a tumultuous, mixed-up sense of real history. Here is the core of much political conflict: Us good, them bad.

[Major spoilers follow]

As Fellian moves through this world, one where the Liberationists kept her imprisoned and in an asylum, where she learned only the most basic tenets of her fire-magic and was denied the ability to return home or even purchase her freedom, we make assumptions about the ideologies at work. Fellian keeps her cohort, and the reader, at arms-length, forcing us to examine the assumption that we know what kind of political leanings breed bad judgment. Then, at the end, it’s revealed that Fellian was orphaned by the monarchists; that her family was writing and printing seditious material during the monarchists reign, and as part of their punishment, she was separated from her family and sent to the asylum to be taught as a servant mage. She tells Lord Roake, the monarchist in charge of the rebel group, that she doesn’t want to join the monarchists at all, she just wants to return home.

I don’t typically care for neat little twists at the ends of novels, much less at the ends of novellas, but the more I think about Servant Mage, the more I realize that Elliott has been building every swift-moving plot point up to this exact ending. This is a world where power corrupts, where fear rules over idealism, where sharp, jagged edges pierce through the aether and into the skin of every person who gets caught up in distant power struggles. It’s a twist, but it’s not a surprise. At the end, when Fellian tells the monarchists that they’re just as bad as every other regime, it feels cathartic. It feels right. The self-assured righteousness of the monarchists now seems hollow, suddenly more self-serving than selfless, their noble promises wilting in the wake of an account of a life shattered by their own cause.

In the final scenes, Fellian goes home. Not to the hotel where she had been indentured as a servant mage, but to her hometown, from which she was taken as a child. The final moments of Servant Mage don’t place faith in systems, but in communities, in cultural strongholds, in the roots that can be bent out of shape but never truly broken. Elliott has established a world of opposing political factions and refused to give either of them the validation they crave from people like Fellian, the people they seek to control. Fellian gets to leave, to go home with a deeper understanding of what power means to the people in power, and a knowledge of how to fight against those systems in her own life, in her own community.

With nuance and cleverness, Elliott creates a unique fantasy world that is very different from our own, but mired in the same bigotry, inefficient political machinations, and acceptable collateral-damaged population that we can recognize. The solution that Fellian finds, that she fights for, is the ability to build a community for the people who are forced to live underneath systems of control, to preserve the culture and sophistication of whatever place has survived the pressure of regimes. Fellian gets to start over, and Elliott ends the book with the subtle recognition that hope and trauma are often, indelibly, soul-bound together.