Charlotte Kersten

In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own.

Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be enslaved to his family’s interest or to be committed to a witches’ asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn’t leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family, but even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veterans’ hospital, Miles can’t hide what he truly is.

When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.

Review

This is a book with a lovely premise, but sadly I don’t feel that it ever quite lived up to how good it could have been. What it comes down to, I think, is that there is just so much going on in this little book and none of it is really done due diligence. There are bits of commentary on war and mental health and trauma in veterans, class exploitation and privilege and family conflict as well as a mystery and a love story and it rather feels like everything gets a cursory touch instead of the deep dive that it merits.

A good example is the fact that Miles is a veteran who was a prisoner of war forced to repeatedly heal torture victims so that they could be tortured again. This is what we in the psych biz would call moral injury and it frequently accompanies PTSD in veterans. So it’s really cool that Polk includes it here…except it’s mentioned maybe three times at the most and Miles only displays any feelings about this or symptoms (perhaps besides his dedication to his patients) on a few occasions as well.

This problem extends to the world-building too, which I found to be dissatisfyingly vague. There are some really cool ideas like the magic based on souls, the faelike Amaranthine in their own world, the necromancy and the magical oppression but it all needs to be defined much more clearly. I don’t really know what it means to Sing, or what it’s truly like to be a Secondary – Miles discusses it being akin to slavery, and then Grace says that Secondaries are only required to work eight nights a year? And some of them are being selectively bred but that’s mentioned once and never again? There’s some element of division between witches and mages but people know about the witches but not the mages? The Amaranthine are first mentioned in the conversation when it is revealed that Tristan is one?? I don’t know, I just really wanted to know more about everything and it feels a little flimsy as presented in text.

The romance also moves incredibly quickly and I found it to be fairly bland overall. Miles and Tristan are talking about marriage by the end of the book and making professions of love when I felt like they basically just meet up a few times to talk about the mystery that they are trying to solve. The most complex character in the story is probably Miles’ sister Grace, but she betrays him twice – first by binding him as a Secondary and then by telling their father that they’re going to the asylum – and Miles seems to have very muted emotional reactions to both of these events and she seems to just get away with everything horrible she does.