I loved the Age of Darkness trilogy and was so hyped for Katy Rose Pool’s next series since the announcement! It just sounded so fun, and the fake dating trope definitely didn’t hurt either. In Garden of the Cursed, a cursebreaker reluctantly agrees to help break the curse of the old friend who snubbed her a year ago, which turns into a fake relationship so she can investigate a lead on her mother’s disappearance.

A year ago, Marlow Briggs left high society in Evergarden for the Marshes after her mother mysteriously disappeared. Now, she’s made herself into a popular cursebreaker, hunting down bad people and undoing hexes for a living, with the help of her best friend Swift. One day, she finally identifies a lead on her mother’s disappearance, which unfortunately involves going back to Evergarden. Luckily, her old friend and heir to one of the richest families in the city, Adrius Falcrest, turns up at her door, asking her to break the curse laid upon him. They agree to fake a relationship so that Marlow can investigate both her own mystery as well as Adrius’s, uncovering secrets and corruption throughout the city.

The worldbuilding was very interesting! Magic exists as spells that require a hex card and the corresponding incantation. Marlow is a cursebreaker, a bit similar to a bounty hunter since she has to hunt down the people who cursed the person who’s paying her, in order to find and burn the card. Magic and the resources needed to create spells are also gatekept by the Five Families, who essentially run the city.

Adrius is a scion and heir to one of these families, while Marlow was allowed to be educated alongside him and the other noblesse nouveau since her mother worked as a chevalier to one of the Five Families. She was ostracized by everyone there aside from Adrius; however, their friendship existed in private, when he would appear at her apartment to bother her. A year ago, even that was ruined when he publicly wanted nothing to do with her. A few days later, Marlow’s mother disappeared and she flees to the Marshes, not seeing Adrius until a chance encounter that later leads to him asking her to break his curse.

Thus, the fake relationship has a certain degree of tension underlying it, not just because of the unresolved feelings between the two of them but also because with it, Marlow has to return to a world that reminds her of her mother. She can’t help but feel even more out of place now. Everyone also seems suspicious, possibly having a hand either in Adrius’s curse or in her mother’s disappearance.

I was invested in both the major mysteries, and while I could see one of the twists coming, it was still exciting to see how we would get to the reveal. The book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, and I can’t wait to read the sequel! Thankfully, this is a duology, so we only have to wait for one more book to uncover all the answers.

Aside from all this, I really liked the characters! Marlow has had to be independent for the past year; even though she has outside support, she doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt, so she’ll stubbornly take everything on herself. I liked seeing her friendship with Swift, who persistently has to remind her that she’s not alone. Meanwhile, Adrius gets under Marlow’s skin, but it’s clear (at least, to the reader) that he’s always liked her. Their banter was a lot of fun to read.

Full of mystery and intrigue, Garden of the Cursed was a fun fantasy with great characters and intriguing worldbuilding. I sped through this book so quickly because I was having the time of my life, and I can’t wait for the sequel. If you’re in the market for a fantasy mystery, you should definitely pick up Garden of the Cursed!

It’s not often I’m on a streak of GOOD books, but this makes one of my top reads so far for the year in YA. Marlow is a curse breaker, after leaving her more high end lifestyle after her mother disappears. Marlow takes risks, and those risks/mistakes have consequences. A dash of political intrigue, and plenty of magic, secrets and lies, makes a quick read. I can’t wait for the sequel!

This book follows Marlow, a girl who grew up adjacent to the nobles of society (her mother worked for one of the Five Families, the most powerful families in this world) until her mother disappears. She leaves that world and becomes a curse breaker for hire when an old friend shows up asking for her to break his curse.

I loved the magic system in this world. The idea of using cards to hold spells was super cool and I loved the idea of having spell cards in your pocket to whip out at any point. I am still a little unsure how the magic works. There’s a lot of hints that making spells requires ingredients like blood or memories but we are never told how that leads to spell cards.

This book did pretty well with the characters. I loved hearing the banter between Marlow and her best friend, Swift (especially when he called her out on her dumb decisions), the banter between Marlow and Adrius, and the political interactions. While there is romance in this book (and fake dating), it was definitely a slow burn and was not the focal point. As a side note, I loved Toad, the curse-detecting cat!!

The ending felt very sudden (I was expecting another 30 pages before the ending). I don’t think enough questions were answered or fully developed before the book ended. I know there will be a sequel and I can understand wanting to leave the readers wanting more to pick up book 2 but this felt a little too rushed in my opinion. That being said, I 100% will pick up book 2! Overall, a solid 3.75 star read!!

Thank you to NetGalley and MacMillan for the Advanced Reader’s Copy!

This book was a perfect YA fantasy, and it's so refreshing to see a book not trying too hard to become a new adult list of tropes just to go viral on booktok.

Marlow is a strong character and I'd genuinely follow her story to whatever end.

(And also that last twist was insane so looking forward to how Adrius and Marlow move forward with this new info!!!!)

This novel was a great read! Action, adventure, romance, mystery, betrayal, and so much more is this first novel of the series. There are many secrets waiting to be unveiled, but those in power keep them close. Enter a world where nothing is as it seems and trust no one. Magic is in the hands of the powerful five families. Those who live in the marshes have to avoid the gangs as well as be weary of the 5 families. Marlow has ties to both worlds and needs a way back in to society to discover the truth about her mother. Marlow is resourceful, but has a knack for getting into trouble and poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. When a blast from the past re-enters her life, Marlow sees this as an opportunity to discover the truth, but only gets more questions and attracts attention of several people, some who wish to use her, others wish her dead. A novel that keeps you reading for more. Looking forward to the next novel!
I received this novel from net galley and the publisher as an ARC. Thank you! All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I loved Katy’s other series so much and I didn’t know exactly what to expect but I very much enjoyed this new series which is very different from the first. The characters (as always) are amazing and so interesting to follow.

I cannot wait for more!

I went into this book with only the briefest idea of the plot and was pleasantly surprised by how thrilling it was! In a market oversaturated with ancient and medieval fantasy settings, the Gilded Age-inspired setting and Art Nouveau aesthetic was a fun and unique fantasy world. I’m a sucker for a good, layered city-setting, and Caraza was a fantastic blend of decadence and gritty crime. Some of the criminal gangs felt a bit too stereotypical for me, but I’m hoping their plots get tightened up and refined before publication.

Garden of the Cursed really delivers on the fantasy-mystery pitch. The mystery felt integral to the storyline instead of falling victim to the inevitable romantic subplot, and there were enough red-herrings thrown in that it kept me second-guessing. Although I was able to guess the eventual culprit, it was still really fun to explore other characters, even if they were momentary distractions. The cast of characters as a whole were really interesting, and Pool does a good job of using her characters to explore the different dynamics amongst the elite noblesse nouveau. However, I felt like a lot of the characters fell into tropes (ex: gay best friend, trio of mean girls, suspicious friend of the love interest, pretty upper-class girl who befriends the main character, etc.) and their motivations often felt unexplored. It didn’t distract me too much, but for the sheer amount of characters in this book, I would have appreciated a deeper dive into their psyches. I will say that the briefest foreshadowing of Amara+Gemma and Silvan+Swift definitely had me anticipating their relationships in the sequel!

If the secondary characters felt a bit too one-dimensional for my taste, the two main characters were thankfully more developed. Marlow was a good protagonist with a borderline-destructive determination that I could personally relate to, especially when it came to her inability to settle for her circumstances. Adrius had me squealing a couple of times and definitely felt a little Cardan Greenbriar-esque; his pithy one-liners didn’t feel too forced or overly sexual. I liked the slow-burn rekindled romance between Marlow and Adrius, though their lack of communication could be exasperating to some readers—they were really testing my tolerance. I didn’t fully understand why Marlow “hated” Adrius so much (the miscommunication trope required quite the suspension of belief and it seemed mostly one-sided “enemies”-to-lovers), but the romantic tension between them and numerous confession scenes that escalated with each revelation were fantastic.

As much as Garden of the Cursed could be a character-driven book (it’s only from Marlow’s POV), I found that my enjoyment derived from the plot and world. Pool does a great job of using mystery to propel the plot while slowly revealing the city setting, from the fabulously-rich Evergarden to the swampy Marshes. I wish we could have known more about the spellcard and curse magic that drives the entire economy, but there were enough tidbits of information to satiate me. I’m really looking forward to book 2, so hopefully the sequel develops the world and magic further!

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co (Macmillan Children’s) for the e-ARC! All thoughts and opinions are my own.

4.5/5 stars

So many twists and turns, hit after hit.I never wanted this book to end and when it did it left me wanting more. Looking forward to more from these characters

Marlow Briggs is a fantastic curse breaker, part magician, part detective, if someone comes to her with a curse she will figure out who cast it and see to it that the curse is lifted. It is the life she has built for herself in the year since her mother disappeared and she needed to leave the glimmering streets of Caraza’s beyond wealthy Evergarden district for the mean streets and hard living of the Marshes. The life suits her well enough even if the mystery most important to her has run into a dead end. At least, it suits her well enough until an old friend the son of one of Evergarden’s most powerful spell-making families, tracks her down with what might be the most dangerous curse of her career. With this curse comes a break in the case of her mother’s disappearance, and for the sake of her own mystery Marlow might just be willing to deal with a fake relationship with the boy who broke her heart. But what happens when trying to figure out Adrius’ curse and her mother’s disappearance starts to reveal a mystery even greater, even more dangerous, than either that brought her to it?

Katy Rose Pool’s Garden of the Cursed is a book with fascinating potential and a romance that left me more than a touch frustrated. The setting is a delight, a blend of people abandoned to the edges of society, forced at times to sell their blood, their words, their very memories to survive, and the nobility, the high society who waste so very much so very deliberately just to show off. The magic system as described is something I really want to be allowed as a reader to chew on. But then the romance crops up and just sits there refusing to move forward or allow anything else to move forward without it.

I do want to acknowledge, having complained about the romance, that I did expect romance to be present in Garden of the Cursed, this is a YA fantasy novel centering a fake dating situation after all. I expected the romance to happen. But, despite this being the first in a duology, I did not expect the romance to dig its heels in and refuse to move at all until the very end of the book. It got really to see Marlow tamping down on her swooning over Adrius or noting to herself how very sincere about his feelings Adrius seemed, only to remind herself that he has to be good at. This is not just because the romance was pretty obviously going to happen, but also because every time a moment like that happened it felt like an opportunity for solid character growth got quashed. It made the big reveal of Adrius’ feelings feel cheap and the dramatic moment where it happens feel silly and overwrought instead of properly shattering.

All that above, said to get my big complaint about the book out of the way. For me the romance in Garden of the Cursed was poorly included and did a lot to get in the way of a legitimately interesting mystery set in a world that I wanted to chew on well after I finished reading the book. If the mystery had been given more of the page space that the fake relationship took, or if we had seen more of the world, that would have been brilliant. There is this amazing divide between the Marshes, peopled by the lower class, haunted by dangerous mafia style gangs, the source of so many of the ingredients needed for spell work, and Evergarden, the wealthy district, peopled by the Five Families, glittering with magic and money in near equal measure, a place of lavish waste. Marlow has lived in both of these areas. Knows that she, the daughter of a chevalier rather than a noble, belongs far more to the Marshes than Evergarden. Knows how horribly wasteful Evergarden is and how very much that wastefulness costs the people of the Marshes. And that is all touched on, but not much more than that.

Similarly the magic system, with its strange and costly ingredients and the need for spellwriters to create cards to hold spells, absolutely fascinates me. I want to know more about how it works. What kind of spells can be written into cards? What are the limits? How are ingredients like memories or a person’s voice used? I want to know more about all of it and more, but there was not room given for that.

On the positive side, Pool does a good job with the character work on the whole. Marlow is a solidly realized protagonist with what feels like good reasons for why she does not trust many of the other characters, Adrius in particular. Adrius is clearly conflicted by the whole fake relationship thing and has several moments where it is obvious that he is putting his heart on the line and being totally open to Marlow. Even more minor characters are nicely consistent and feel well thought out.

I find myself unsure of where this leaves me exactly with Garden of the Cursed. The story is solid. The world building is solid. The character work is good. But all of it winds up feeling secondary to a romance that frustrates me so, so badly because it over stays its welcome and would have been resolved in all of two scenes if Marlow and Adrius had bothered to actually talk to each other at all. Despite all of my frustration with the romance, I find myself deeply curious about how the story is going to resolve in light of the various twists at the end of the book. I want to see this grander mystery solved and that has to mean something good for the book. So, yeah, I give Garden of the Cursed a three out of five with the note that that comes with a healthy dose of hope that the sequel has way, way less of the romance.

I, unfortunately, was not a fan of this book. I thought the beginning was interesting and I could see great potential for it. For me though, the world was too confusing and there were too many characters from the beginning. This book just wasn’t my thing.

As far as modern YA fantasy goes this was good, it at least seemed interested in the basics of worldbuilding and character work.

I am so upset--I loved this book and THE ENDING!!! Talk about gut-wrenching cliffhangers. I simply cannot wait for book #2! Garden of the Cursed is an incredibly fun and interesting book. I really enjoyed the magic/mystery combo. I requested this after attending a webinar where the author described it as Veronica Mars + magic and thought it sounded like a story I would enjoy, which I absolutely did. Marlow is a fierce character--she is funny, she's been hurt, and she doesn't trust easily. Adrius is part of a powerful family, but he just want Marlow in his world. After he is cursed, Marlow helps him try to break the curse and figure out the many layers of palace intrigue that are involved. My students will love this one and I highly recommend it. It has a little something for everyone--magic, romance, mystery, and a little suspense and danger.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillian for the advance copy!

OH I absolutely loved this book - the characters, the plot, the intrigue, the worldbuilding were all so well done! I am so excited for the second book!

Thank you for the opportunity to read early!

Thank you for the opportunity to read this arc from MacMillian Children’s publishing group. It is available June 20,2023.

First off this was a fun mysterious read. Marlo’s Briggs is a curse breaker who used to be amongst the elite but now kicks it with the lowlies. Marlo’s is tough independent but not so much that she has no common sense or lacks logical thinking skills as is the thing with most us heroines. So that is a great bonus for me. I didn’t feel the need to head desk or facepalm the entire book.

The male main character is the boy of the elite. He’s swarmy and cool. The reason she ran from her old life to her new after the mysterious disappearance of her mother. Adrius is the love interest and he is cursed so he comes to Marlow the curse breaker to help him get the curse off and find out whom it is that cursed him.

What follows was a highly enjoyable mystery fantasy romp. I thoroughly enjoyed myself reading this book

This was an absolute winner. Intrigue, excellent characters, an imaginative plot and magic. Marlow will drive you crazy but you can’t help but love her tenacity. Bring on book two. T

Wow. This was an amazing first book.

Set in a world with curses, spells, high society, enemies-lovers, ruling families. Minnow and Adrius were put together through school. Minnie doesn’t belong as she is not part of high society. Adrius and Minnow have a fondness for each other until Minnow is forced to leave after the disappearance of her mother. We meet them a year later as Marlow has become a go to cursebreaker. The story follows a curse put on Adrius. Who put it on him? Why?

The book was well written with good world building. It leans more YA, so less steam. Slow burn. (I prefer allllll the steam). Great first book to hook you into the characters.

*ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

I received a copy of this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.
I am so pleasantly surprised by this book. I absolutely love the mystery/fantasy that is happening in this book.
-Incredible magic system
-Strong characters
-Curse Breaker
-Fake dating > falls in love
-YA so no spice if that is what you're looking for
-MYSTERY
I actually really liked this story, and now that it is over I really hope we get a sequel to continue the story. I hope in the sequel the author continues to world build and give us even more depth to the characters. I think that the author has a pretty good foundation in this story to really make a cool series. The writing was well done. I think this would be a great book for YA readers.
I will be posting reviews on Amazon, Instagram, Goodreads.

11/10 this book is sooooo good! If you like mysteries but with a magic twist then this book is for you. If you like the fake dating trope but oh wait we actually love each other then this book is for you. I was on the edge of my seat and had to binge read this quickly and I’m so bummed that it ends on a cliffhanger because now I have to bite my nails and wait for the next one. I had no idea this book would be this good. You should read it!! So good.

No spice. Definitely YA appropriate.

4.5/5 stars! This book had a creepy energy to it that I loved. I enjoyed Katy's other series so I was excited to check this out. I really appreciated the world-building and I love bada** female leads with assassin, poisoner, and curse-breaker energy. Marlow was strong and vulnerable in equal measure and she seemed to have a very mature thought-process, despite this being a YA fantasy book. A thoroughly enjoyable fantasy read and I'm excited to read the conclusion of this story in the second book in this duology.

I received an advance review copy for free through NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily

One of my favorite reads of 2022! Pool knocks it out of the park with a taut mystery built within an exquisitely built fantasy world. The characters vividly drawn as well and I loved playing along with the clues to try to figure out the mystery. Eagerly waiting for the next book!