Charlotte Kersten

Summary

About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She’ll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.

And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust—and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.

As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren’t so clear…

Review

What I Thought

There are a few reasons I think Poison Study didn’t gel for me, and they are as follows:

1) The setting

My fundamental question is as follows: is Ixia supposed to be a dystopia or not? Given the world-building that is presented throughout the course of the book I feel strongly that it should be, but I don’t think Snyder has entirely made up her mind. Ixia is a land led by a military commander who holds a massive amount of power and seized it through a coup. All religions are forbidden, arts and culture languish, and – most importantly- the Commander has enacted a policy of total annihilation against people who have magic:

“Magicians had been treated like disease-riddled mosquitoes. They were hunted, trapped and exterminated. Any hint or suggestion that someone had magic was a death sentence. The only chance to live was to escape to Sitia.”

Quite simply, this is a genocide. Yelena spends the entire book living in terror that her magic will be exposed. What’s more is that there are ample proofs of further human rights violations: dissenters are killed or disabled and the law is unyielding in the extreme. Yelena killed a man because he had been abusing her for years, but she was sentenced to death for it, and even after she saves the Commander’s life and overthrows a plot to take control of Ixia she is sentenced to death again. There’s a lot of sugar-coating about Yelena’s position in the castle, but she is a slave: a prisoner-turned-worker doing a dangerous and menial job with no pay and the only other option being death. Then there are the tiny things, like what the Commander says to her when extenuating circumstances (that she has no control over) cause her to taste his food late one day:

“Yelena, if I have to eat cold food again, I’ll have you whipped. Understand?”

This does not paint a pretty picture of Ixia, does it? But the strange thing is that Yelena repeatedly comments that Commander Ambrose has improved the land considerably and treats everyone fairly and equally. By the end of the book we are clearly supposed to see him and his spymaster (and right hand man) Valek in a very positive light; Valek is the story’s love interest. There’s a baffling discrepancy between what the reader is supposed to feel and what is actually written on the page.

2) The trauma

Yelena murders the General’s son after years of horrific abuse, culminating in sexual assault. In addition, she is attacked and threatened with rape on a couple of other occasions throughout the book. She is taunted by Reyad’s ghost on several occasions and has one flashback to the sexual assault but other than that she is perfectly well-adjusted despite the fact that she is currently a slave who confronts death on a daily basis, was previously imprisoned for months and before that was a tortured orphan. On the occasion of the most intense confrontation with the ghost and the flashback to the rape, she suddenly snaps back into the present moment and basically just thinks to herself “Oh welp I missed breakfast! Darn it!”

In addition, you could almost make the argument that the sexual violence is all perpetrated by members of the military and this demonstrates the cruelty and devaluation of human rights that is inherent to Ixia’s militaristic society. But Ixia is an equal society, and the Commander makes sure everyone is treated fairly, remember?

3) The romance

“Valek snatched a gray rock from his desk and hurled it toward me.”

First of all, we’ve established that Yelena is a slave, right? Well, Valek is in control of virtually every aspect of her existence. He controls whether she lives or dies, whether she lives in his rooms or the dungeon, whether she gets the antidote that saves her from agonizing pain on a daily basis. There is no possibility of a healthy romance stemming from this context and no amount of carved butterflies can change that. It’s especially frustrating (as it always is) when the FMC is coming from a horrible background of abuse and ends up in a new relationship that is still shitty but not understood as such by the text. Did I mention he throws a rock at her head?

4) The transphobia

There is a dramatic reveal about Commander Ambrose at the end of the book, and it is as follows:

“He was a she, but with the utter conviction that she should have been born a man.”

While I think it’s pretty cool that Snyder chose to include a trans character in a fantasy world so long ago, I think it’s possible that this phrasing has just aged poorly so that it doesn’t stand up to gender-affirming language in the present day; this phrasing implies that a transgender man is in fact just a woman (a “she”) who really, really feels (has an “utter conviction”) like she is a man (a “he”).

Yelena does switch back to referring to Ambrose as a man, but there is then another revelation that bothers me more than anything else about this book: Yelena realizes that the reason the Commander is committing a genocide against magicians is because they might be able to discover that he’s transgender. Ahhh!!!!!