The Book of Gems is the third book/novella in a fantasy series with elements of horror by Fran Wilde. Released 20th June 2023 by Macmillan on their Tor imprint, it's 142 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.

The prose is compelling and surprisingly lush given the short form novella length. The author is particularly adept at characterization and setting. There's an overarching sense of creeping dread (much like, though not at all derivative of, Lovecraft... expecting jump scares every couple pages with increasing sense of dread).

Although it's the third in the series (and there are ancillary stories in collections and anthologies floating around), it works fine as a standalone. The novellas are all standalones featuring different MCs and different time periods. This one does a great job of presenting themes of artifact and cultural misappropriation.
Four stars. Well written and satisfying.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

This novella is a terrific read, a true page-turner, set in a world that is gripping and vividly brought to life and where there are unique and profound ties between gems and magic and people. If this really is the last Gem Universe book, then it's a worthy, and quite spectacular ending. As so often in Wilde's work, it's relationships that are at the heart of the story. In this case, it's the friendship and bond between the gem scientist, Devina Brunai and Lurai, a young woman living in the Valley who has already lost her mother at the ancient, excavated Palace of Gems. The Book of Gems digs into the past, and finds terrifying and beautiful treasures, and maybe even a new kind of future.

I don’t recall loving The Jewel and Her Lapidary, but what I did remember was intriguing, and this said it’s a stand-alone in the same world so I thought I’d give it another shot. I don’t know whether to blame the world-building and coming in on the third installment barely remembering the first, but this just never felt coherent to me. Why was anything happening, what was happening, who are these people even, and why should I care?

It seems like this might be a me thing, from other reviews, but for me it just didn’t come together. Some stuff felt rushed, other stuff I was ready to stop hearing about yesterday or sooner.

Not a good fit for me, I think.

I really enjoyed this novella! I loved the exploration of cultural appropriation and theft of artifacts. Dr. Devina Brunai is an interesting protagonist, and I love that she is a scientist. I highly recommend this series!

Book Summary:

Centuries ago, the Jeweled Valley and its treasures (magical gems) were lost to time. Or so everyone thought. The legends still hold strong, even as most people believe them to be little more than a bit of lore.

Dr. Devina Brunai isn't one of those. She believes the Book of Gems is real, alongside the Palace of Gems. When the Palace is uncovered, she knows that she was right, and thus the rest of her theories might prove true as well...

My Review:

If this is the conclusion to The Gem Universe, it's the conclusion we've been waiting for. The Book of Gems is a fantastical adventure full of complex storytelling and magical elements. In truth, I never wanted it to end.

The Book of Gems made rooting for Dev and Lurai (her cousin) so easy. Dev's backstory is less than simple, with more than one unscrupulous character messing up her chosen path in life. This backstory fills the reader with righteous indignation, adding an emotional tie between the reader and the character.

As for the rest of this plot? Well, that's the stuff of magic. We never get to see too much of the magical system at any one time. It's enough to make you crave more – ironic, given that is likely how every magic hunter feels in this world. It's possible to see the larger story when combined with the rest of this world. In other words, it was perfect.

Highlights:
Fantasy World
Magical Gems
Sentient Book

I really liked the magic system in this one! Thank you so much Tordotcom for sending me an early copy, I really do appreciate it. I cannot wait to read the other two books that are connected

thank you to netgalley for the advanced reading copy of The Book of Gems, this really was not for me and I struggled to get through this.

this was okay, but read a little juvenile and i didn't feel connected to the characters or what happens to them at all. i can see other reader enjoying this a lot tho!

— thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the free digital ARC.

An academic adventure in the Valley of Gems.

Starting off with dark academia vibes, the book starts fast-paced.
I feel that plot was interesting but the events leading up to the climax were somehow offbeat. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't feel a lot for the protagonist. The book did have an eerie effect with all the non-natural events occurring and one of the few things that kept me going.

This was more of a novella/short story. I think someone who is looking for a quick read with fewer instances focusing on one main track line of story, will enjoy this book better

Thank you @netgalley for the e-ARC, this is my honest review.
Genre: #scifi #fantasy

The Book of Gems by Fran Wilde is the third book in the Gemworld series, but supposedly should be able to stand on its own as well. I have not read any of the prior Gemworld books, and although it did feel like some details were lacking overall it was fairly easy to pick up what was happening. This is a short quick read and kind of gave me Indiana Jones, forbidden/cursed object trope vibes. I may need to dig back and read the previous books to get a better grasp of what brought the characters to this moment.

I haven’t actually read the other two books in this series but after reading this novella I’m intrigued. It’s an interesting world. There’s some low level tech but also a fallen world of magic of the sort that kills the careless and disrespectful. I’ve just picked up book one in the series on the strength of this book. I’m glad I got to read this arc.

I keep picking up books mid-series and keep lucking out with them. I found the premise of this story fascinating. I was instantly able to empathize with Dev and her desire to make a name for herself. The story in intriguing, quick, with just a bit of horror mixed right in there with the fantasy science. Makes me want to go dig up the other gems in this series (ha, pun fully intended).

This is the third novella in the intriguingly disparate Gem Universe series, in which the magical power held within gems in a particular valley shapes the rise and fall of different civilisations over centuries. The Jewel and Her Lapidary, the first book in the series, dealt with the fall of a monarchy built around the power of gems. The second, The Fire Opal Mechanism (review), is set a long time after and a long way away, in a city where human knowledge is under threat from a technology which destroys unique books and reproduces the information in them in a single, approved form. This time, the action is once again centred around an academic institution, at a point where society has effectively forgotten that "real" gems once held power and built its technology around synthetic alternatives. The Valley where gems originated is now a marginalised backwater, its inhabitants nominally given ownership of their own cultural artefacts but subjected to outside study and interpretation of their history.

The action of the Book of Gems follows two women. Devina, or Dev, is a researcher and descendent of a Valley family, returning on a trip to locate her missing supervisor, who stole Dev's research and then disappeared after a series of increasingly fragmented and cryptic messages back to the university. Lacking support from her university and cautious about revealing her own family history, Dev soon meets with her cousin Lurai, who is trying to make ends meet running the Valley's main inn after the disappearance of her mother. Lurai's mother, it transpires, was hired to guide Dev's supervisor into the ruins of the Palace of Gems - which outside researchers are forbidden from setting foot in - and so the two women's goals quickly become intertwined, particularly as the gems themselves start making themselves heard. And so does the entity calling itself the Prince of Gems...

While this novella could technically stand alone, The Book of Gems really benefits from an understanding of the Gem Universe and the magic which Wilde has built up over the series. Even with the technological advancement over the course of the books, the Valley's gems remain fundamentally mysterious and unknowable: magical artefacts with their own voice, offering power which comes at an often horrifying price, demanding strict control from those who harness it. (In other words, the tropes are on point). It helps that we only see this world in glimpses, through novellas and shorter fiction, with the advancements between each story left largely unexplored. While I'm sure Wilde has the storytelling ability to pull off a longer novel in the Gem Universe, this is the type of world where catching glimpses creates a very... satisfying... sense of being unsatisfied. (I note, on rereading my 2019 review of The Fire Opal Mechanism, that I didn't feel this way then... but I do now!)

The Book of Gems also offers a sense of balance to the revolutionary upheaval that we saw in The Gem and Her Lapidary, and a literal excavation of the legacy that was buried in that book, although I am more ambivalent about the political direction here. Because the Gems are linked to the Valley, a location which has been subsumed and marginalised by the larger Republics which have come after, there's a direct link between their lost magic and the lost independence of the Valley itself. The direct influence of the Republic isn't present - not in the same way as The Fire Opal Mechanism, but the power of colonising forces is well represented through Dev's university, which sends researchers into the Valley to interpret the artefacts which its own people are tasked with digging up. That the university refuses to allow Dev, a descendent of the Valley, the status to pursue her own work, and maintained a system where her supervisor was able to take it from her without the intervention of any of her colleagues, is icing on the cake. It makes Dev more sympathetic, but the extractiveness of the institution is well established even before Dev (and Inara's) personal grievances come into play.

The alternative, however, is presented (alongside a gauntlet of increasing body horror) as a return to rightful monarchy, and that too feels... off. Perhaps this is the point at which the sparseness of the Gem Universe setting becomes a drawback rather than a benefit: it feels like the time we spend with Dev and Inara never quite gets us to a point of understanding how people in the Valley feel, other than a general disdain for their research visitors. While novella length is tricky when it comes to political deep dives, I would have liked to see more nuance behind the presentation of a returned monarchy and what that might mean for the Valley: sure, there is a cultural memory of Gems and a lost past which makes uncovering it attractive, but does the reality line up with that cultural memory? The Book of Gems glosses over that for what feels like an easier "Isn't reconnecting with one's heritage great" ending, and I don't think that does the rest of the book justice.

Still, this is a great series, and there's lots in The Book of Gems to enjoy, particularly if you derive enjoyment from squirming over weird magical body alterations and/or shitty academic practices. This series has been billed as a trilogy, and there's certainly a sense of completion here, but thhere's also short fiction in this universe so perhaps this isn't the last time we'll see the Gems and the Lapidaries of the Valley, and their creepy singing rock "friends". Perhaps they'll institute a more representative form of self-governance in our absence? You never know.

I’m not familiar with the other two books in this series, but I was instantly intrigued by the premise of Fran Wilde’s The Book of Gems.

The Book of Gems was a story about greed, theft, and academic rivalry intertwined with the active history of the “Jeweled Valley.” This was a solid adventure story with plenty of cool world building to keep me interested from the first page to the last. I liked how the gem-based magic system was approached as a science and an avenue of study (a source of relics), particularly from the perspective of Devina (Dev) Brunai. She was a character who reminded me of Emily Wilde from Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, in that Dev was an academic who struggled to have her skill and work recognized. Like Emily, there was an overall pervading feeling of being stifled. And I liked the way the author portrayed Dev’s frustration as well as her conflicted feelings: wanting to find her mentor but also wanting retribution and to reclaim her stolen research.

There was much more to the story than that, and I enjoyed how the different clues came together in a way that offered a satisfying conclusion.

Overall, The Book of Gems was a quick read, but I had a lot of fun with this novella.

Disclaimer: this copy of the book was provided by the publisher (Tor.com) via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

*Thank you Tor for this ARC!*

When this book was offered to me as an arc, the blurb indicated that it was the kind of book that could be read stand alone. They weren't wrong and now I'm definitely going to be picking up the rest of the series ASAP!

In this book, “Dev'' the scientist discovers that she has put her faith in the wrong person, the man who’s been acting as her mentor. When he mysteriously vanishes, the Society for Scientific Endeavors of the Six Republics denies her the right to journey to the Jeweled Valley to search for him. She is compelled to either find him, or finish the research he started. Without the proper credentials, Dev takes a train and sneaks into the Jeweled Valley. From the moment she arrives in the valley and checks into Deaf King Inn, it’s clear that this trip isn’t going to be anything like she expected.

This book has family, mystery, gems, gems, and more gems. Oh did I mention gems? What else could I want?

Wilde concludes the Gem Valley series in a wonderful way while also managing to give this installment its own standalone story that also slots into the larger arc of the series. We get more of the duality between the idea of modernity and scientific progress against tradition and magic, and who you want to be versus who you end up being. There's also the politics of archaeological digs! Also - body horror involving jewels! A quick read that manages to leave the possibility of a future open, but neatly wraps the series to this point. Perfect read for the beach this summer.

This was a unusual and fun novella about a young woman who wants to prove herself in her profession and ends up tangled in complicated family histories and looted artifacts. I went in without having read the other books in the Gem series by Fran Wilde and while I could tell there was a lot more to be told about the story, I had no issues following along with the plot, the world, or the characters. The world is really unique and interesting and I hope that we get more in other novellas or a full length novel in the future. Thank you to TorDotCom and NetGalley for the digital ARC.

This is the third book in the Gem Universe. Each book is technically a standalone, and this was the first book in the series I read. Dev is a scientist who must enter the Jeweled Valley to find her mentor and retrieve the research he stole from here, but Dev is going to learn that perhaps there is more to science than what happens with the gems in the Valley.

I really liked the horror elements on the novel and the mystery. I found Dev's slow reactions to the horror a little frustrating, but overall it was a good read. I think there might be some small aspects that I would have understood better if I had read the books set in the earlier history of this world, but overall I was able to understand the world and the story.

First of all, thanks to Emily over at Tor for sending me an ARC of this title! I know Fran Wilde to be a very prolific SFF writer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t gotten around to reading one of her books yet. So this felt like as good of a time as any. I will say I wasn’t aware that this book was part of a series, but after some quick perusing, it seemed like it could also be read as a stand-alone, so I dove right in!

One of the harder things, sometimes, when picking up a SFF title that is part of a series but has also been marketed as a stand-alone is trying to center oneself in the world and any magic system that may or may not be present. Unlike contemporary or historical fiction, the reader cannot rely on a knowledge of our own world to fill in any gaps that may have been missed from previous books. So I think it’s a mark of Wilde’s talent that it was a fairly smooth process orienting myself with this world. Necessary information flowed out in a natural, timely way without any info-dumping early in the novel, and the patient reader will be rewarded by looking up about halfway through the read and realizing that they already do know everything they need to about this series even without any obvious “telling” sections.

Beyond how the information was given, I enjoyed the world and magic that was laid out here. The gems and the way they operate is clever and unique. I also really enjoyed the blending of several genres that we see here. Fantasy, of course, but there were also strong hints of the mystery and historical genres. As our main character is also a research, this book also hits on the currently quite popular “fantasy academia” subgenre. I’ve really enjoyed this resurgence and very much enjoyed this nice blending of many types of stories.

I also liked the character well enough. Though here I will say is where the story fell a bit flat for me. There was nothing wrong with any of them, but I also never felt supremely invested in our main character’s story or that of any of the side characters. Here, perhaps, is where more familiarity with the first two books could have helped, as a better sense and expectation of overall tone could have aided in my feeling invested in these stories. However, the characters were still interesting and competently portrayed, so fans of the first two books will likely be very pleased with what we get here.

Overall, this was a solid novella, and one that speaks to an interesting wider world. I’ll definitely have to go back and check out the first two books in the series!

Rating 7: Short, sweet, and with a vibrant world and magic system. The only flaw was my inability to feel incredibly invested in some of the characters.

(Link will go live June 16)

The Book of Gems wrapped up the lingering questions from the last few books, but also left me with a few more. It was a good ending to this series of novellas, but I would be happy to read more about this world and what happens with the gems.