Creative read, decent world building, great characters!

I think the book is one I would recommend for a weekend read. Not something you will really want to put down. So open it and get ready to be entranced and immersed in a wonderful world

I really liked the plot of this book, but I was so disappointed, everything was so confusing. I didn't understand the world building and I forced myself to finish it.
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This book was actually okay for me in the beginning, but as I got to the middle and ending, it just was not for me. The MMCs were okay, but I didn't like the storyline.
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I didn't even know what they wanted to achieve, who they were fighting against. I will not be reading the second in this series

Tonight Ava will sail into an unknown world with her mother, free of servitude, and all she has to do is steal pharmaka one final time from the priestesses. She's stolen from them countless times before and this should have been an easy job. However, things quickly go wrong when she is left doubled over in pain & confusion after accidentally being overdosed by amanitai. In her efforts to get away, she is found by her childhood friend Dom who inadvertently is also contaminated. It has an effect on them both, tying them together physically and mentally in ways which are strange & mysterious. They must work together to free themselves and secure their futures despite them wanting to go in very different directions.

I liked the symmetry between the two main characters. Both were likeable, innocent and over-trusting, while being complex and in Ava's case, hardened to the world as she knows it. The story is very creative unlike any I have read before. It doesn't fit comfortably into any one genre, it's more of a mix with predominant notes of fantasy, however this is definitely a positive. It's quite a unique read up until the ending, but then this creates a whole mass of other questions, which some of which no doubt will be answered in book two.

Thank you to NetGalley and Love That Book for the opportunity to read an advanced reader's copy of this book for an honest review. (Published: October 18, 2022)

“The Voice in All” by Audrey Auden is Book One of The Artifex and the Muse saga. This was one of those books I took a chance on because the cover art was so beautiful and intriguing, and I was certainly not disappointed! (The breathtaking, full artwork from the cover and more can be found on the author’s website.)

Action-packed and fast-paced from the beginning, this book immediately grabbed my attention and didn’t let go until the end! The writing was captivating with striking imagery throughout. The story was unlike anything I had ever read before with a mix of various genres.

I loved the duel POV between the main characters Ava and Dom. They’re both 16 years old and were friends when they were younger. However, Ava’s mother became part of the Free People seven years prior to the timeline of this book. During that time, she rescued Ava from the Children’s Temple and explained everything to her. They lived in hiding outside of the city and planned to escape one day to truly live outside of the Voice in All.

On the day Ava and her mother were planning to finally free themselves, Ava accidently experienced a massive overdose to amanitai – a binding pharmaka she was attempting to steal to help pay for their freedom. As fate would have it, when Ava encounters her long-lost friend Dom and touches him, they are suddenly linked together via the amanitai. This creates an interesting situation as they can’t be apart and must be touching at all times or else they experience extreme pain. Ava’s plan to leave is suddenly no longer an option, and she must resume the life she left all those years ago.

I loved the strong female presence in this book. It was refreshing to read about so many women in authoritative positions showing great wisdom, strength, and gentleness. I was also pleasantly surprised by how simple yet complex the story was. One moment everything seemed straightforward and predictable, and then the plot would take an unexpected turn and leave me with some lengthy info and complicated twists.

The “Voice in All” was very mysterious and only made a few brief appearances in this book, but I’m expecting that more will be revealed in the second book.

Many scenes from the story have author-suggested music pairings (available on the author’s website). I found this to be a fun and inspiring addition to the book. I was unfamiliar with about half of the songs from the soundtrack, but I did enjoy most of them and felt they were an enhancement to the reading experience.

Overall, I’m on pins and needles to read the next book in this series to find out more about Ava and Dom! I highly recommend this book to older teens and young adults who love romantic fantasy with a dystopian spin.

I would like to thank the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this ARC.

Wow, this book was phenomenal! A five-star read, for sure! Never in my life have I read anything like this book; it’s truly one-of-a-kind. It’s a riveting sensory experience. It’s am ecosystem of its own. The main characters, Dom and Ava, are insightful, utterly human, apologetic, and open to change/expanding and exploring differences in worldview. It was so refreshing to read.

This book doesn’t fit into a classical mode, it subverts preconceived expectations; it reimagines social constructs and shared consciousness just as often as it asks philosophical questions and meditates on the power of nature and the ability of the environment we live in to contour, shape, influence, define/mold, or otherwise transform our awareness and our processes of seeing, our very cognitive perceptions. Splendidly, it conceptualizes the powers of the mind.

We know that Ava’s mom isn’t exactly the most maternal type, considering she abandoned her and took off for the sea without warning, but the level of sociopathy demonstrated by her towards the end of the book was simply incomprehensible. That dark, cutthroat aspect of her personality literally came out of nowhere. Doesn’t she love her daughter? Geez.

Altogether, this book completely defied my expectations; I thought it was a standard sci-fi/fantasy (SFF) book and it was nothing of the sort; I’m not even sure it fits in one specific genre. The book itself felt experimental. The concept was untraditional. The writing was exquisite; I loved the author’s prose. This book also serves as a kind of poetic meditation on the psychology of mystical sects/cults.

Overall, this book was thoughtful, reflective, and intelligent. I deeply enjoyed reading its philosophical and theoretical components and engagements with praxis. This book was truly excellent and I commend the author for writing an exceptional book that resists compartmentalization. It was brilliant, show-stopping, and spectacular, as Lady Gaga would say; and it was by far the best book I’ve read all year. I’m giving this book a solid 4.5 stars. I can’t wait until the next book!

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Thanks so much to NetGalley for the ARC!

This was such an interesting book - I can say I enjoyed it, I can say I will absolutely read the sequel. I can’t say it was entirely unique or utterly predictable, but somewhere in between. I really enjoyed the main characters, Ava and Dom, and how they developed both as individuals and together - the world they live in isn't given a ton of explanation but Auden still manages to make them feel rich and layered.

I wish the book had a bit more worldbuilding and more/history - it’s clear there is a lot there, but I didn’t feel like the world was given the same richness as the characters. The same goes for the….religion? Government? Ruling party? Magic or Caste system? Whatever you’d like to call The Voice and the Moihria. Again, it felt fleshed our enough to not be completely flat while also lacking the depth and richness I really wanted.

Overall, it’s a very character driven book with the makings of a fascinating world and plenty more characters to explore. It’s not for beginners to the fantasy or sci-fi genre, but it’s definitely worth the read for fans of either or both genres. Looking forward to the sequel!

If you love a fast paced book then this is it. The world building and characters are fabulous and made me want to keep reading. Such a great book. Thank you for my eArc.

Well-written, fast-paced, and thought-provoking! Thoroughly enjoyed the world and characters. Highly recommend to other lovers of genre-bending fantasy, and those who like fantasy sagas.

Although this was well done in general, a few factors kept it out of the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list, which it otherwise nearly deserved.

Firstly, the genres. There are too many of them. It's mainly fantasy, and YA, but it's also post-apocalyptic and dystopian. Those last two are genres I usually avoid, but the premise seemed fresh enough that I gave it a go anyway, and was glad I did. The degree to which it's dystopian also comes into question in the course of the story, but I'd argue that a society that denies a whole demographic access to the arts and sciences is at least somewhat dystopian, regardless of how nice and well-intentioned the people who run it may be (and are we sure they actually are?).

Four genres would have been OK, but by the end it also seems to be cosmic, and maybe cyberpunk, and at that point it started to break down a bit for me. By the end of the book, we've had a lot more questions than answers. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger, as such, but it does go from a relatively straightforward fantasy post-apocalyptic YA dystopia to something a lot more complicated that I, for one, struggle to define, and while that may set up the series to be more than it would otherwise have been (if the author can pull it off), for this specific book I felt that less would have been more.

Something else that broke down a little for me was an element of the worldbuilding. In the society depicted, women (through, essentially, magical drugs) are more or less immortal, or at least unaging and very long-lived, but men live normal lifespans. The women engage in arts and sciences and run the society, while the men do the farming, hunting, gathering, essential crafts like smithing, and suchlike. Only a few women give birth to children, and there seem to be as many girls as boys.

This means that for the tech level depicted, the pyramid is the wrong way up. Our society is able to have fewer than half of its members involved in producing food, because of multiple technological breakthroughs, but the tipping point of fewer than half of, say, US adults being involved in agriculture came not much more than a hundred years ago. Unless there's tech we never saw in the book, the economics make no sense. That's a minor point, because it's background, rather than foreground, but it did bother me.

(Since I posted this review, the author has graciously responded to say that is very much something that's on her mind, and there is an explanation to come; she's also incorporated a few elements of that explanation into this book (involving the women growing some of the food), in response to my critique - which I guess makes me a quantum reviewer, affecting things by observing them. I'll leave the critique in place, because the changes - which I've seen - don't fully answer my issues, and I did have questions on first read, but please note that this isn't a result of the author's ignorance about how food works; it's just not her focus in this book.)

On the upside, even in the pre-release copy I received via Netgalley for review, the copy editing has few flaws, apart from the way the author punctuates when interrupting dialog with a tag. (You don't start the second part of a sentence with a capital if it's the same sentence, and if it's a different sentence, you don't follow the tag with a comma.)

The story itself, and the characters, engaged me, despite the usual YA thing of:
Adult: Don't do this thing! Bad consequences will inevitably ensue.
Young person: I accept that completely and it makes total sense.
[Young person then proceeds to do the thing, because it seems like a good idea at the time. Bad consequences mostly fail to ensue.]

I'm giving it a lot of critique, but that's partly because it engaged me enough to think deeply about it. It invited thought; it wasn't just made from box mix, it had some originality to it, and it was well executed and had the odd moment here and there of reflection that made a point with some depth. The flaws, while they did combine to lose it a fifth star, were individually minor enough that they left me still enjoying it, and overall I recommend it and look forward to reading a sequel.