“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

Alchemised, by SenLinYu

Summary

In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.

“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

My Thoughts

I already knew that this was going to be a highly anticipated read for me, as a lover of Harry Potter fanfiction and someone who had read the original work, Manacled, but it has been a while and so fortunately for me, I got to look at this book with fresh eyes and only vague memories of the plot beats. SenLinYu did not disappoint at all. The original piece is cut down perfectly until it is snappy and fast-paced, every chapter contributing to either plot or character in some way. It’s split into three sections, with the bulk of the book being in Part 2, the flashback section, where the readers figure out what happened in real time with Helena as she regains her memories. The worldbuilding is stupendous; again, very distinct from the original work. Paladia comes to life in SenLinYu’s writing, with complicated religions, political structures, and dynamics between classes and genders. I especially loved how the politics of Paladia are complicated, and how Helena’s best friend Lucien Holdfast is the heir to the Holdfast dynasty, who believe they have been blessed by the god Sol with the “divine right” to rule Paladia and control alchemy; something that Guild families like Kaine Ferron’s take umbrage to. As someone who thinks that the “divine right to rule” is bullshit, this brought a whole new element of complication to the politics of the story. Neither the Undying or the Order of the Eternal Flame are clean; both sides are corrupt, misogynistic, and can attract people who do not fully believe in the cause but have no other place to go. It begs the question: how far can you go in war to win, and at what point do the ends stop justifying the means?

The characters are incredibly well written and most importantly, distinct and cogent. Unlike other fanfiction spinoffs (The Love Hypothesis cough cough) Helena Marino and Kaine Ferron stand on their own two feet as well developed characters. If someone went into this book with absolutely no knowledge of Harry Potter or even that this was based on fanfiction, it would still stand as a stupendous book with stupendous characters. Helena and Kaine are the two backbones of the story, with it revolving around their genuine enemies-to-lovers dynamic and the crushing war that surrounds the two of them. Their characters are defined by loneliness; Kaine, because he is a necromancer with the Undying, and Helena, because her vivimancy powers are looked down upon in the Order of the Eternal Flame. There is a beauty to their love story—in the midst of a dark and crushing war that seems to have no end, these two lonely, brilliant, broken people find their way to each other. Their constant sacrifices to protect the other are heartbreaking at times, but always in character. Every single thing Helena does is to protect the people she loves, even if it means breaking and losing herself in the process, enduring trauma after trauma for them. Kaine is one of the first people who is willing to make the same sacrifices for her, as we come to see, and he ask readers how far they would go to protect the people they love. Yet at the same time, Kaine is a monster, willing to do anything, kill anyone, not for the greater good, but for the people he loves. One of my favorite quotes encompasses the complication of it all: “Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. I made him who he is. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.” Helena and Kaine sacrifice everything for each other, and I literally cannot stop thinking about it.

The story dives into issues like classism and sexism very well. Helena is an immigrant from another country, Etras, to the North, standing out because of her darker skin and curly hair. Her work is overlooked and undervalued, as is the work of many women in the story. From guild restrictions to barriers in studying alchemy to barriers in jobs, women are treated unfairly because of who they are. We see this in Helena, who is used by her superiors in the Eternal Flame to do all the dirty work they do not want to, to Lila, who has to be absolutely perfect as Luc’s paladin so that her role as one of the only female paladins ever isn’t removed. Religion is constantly abused by the Eternal Flame against people with vivimancy like Helena simply because of how they are born, because they are considered to have “corrupt souls”. It complicates the war as well: Helena knows the truth of what is happening, how they seem to be losing, but everyone around her simply says that if she has faith and prays to the gods that they will win, even though she can see that this isn’t true.

Let’s be clear: this is a very dark story. It dives into the psychological impact of war, and how far people will go to win and to protect the people they love. The villains are necromancers, and so the dead are key to the work, giving it a grotesque, horror-like element and strong gory imagery. Eugenics, cannibalism, and even some allusions to necrophilia are all present, and this is not for the faint hearted. This is not just a romance, and calling it that devalues everything that the book is about: this is a book about the costs of war. Kaine is the definition of a morally gray MMC, doing horrendous things and losing every bit of himself along the way if it only means that Helena will be safe. This is not a happy story, and even the ending is bittersweet; it is full of rage and love and angst and sorrow and will make you cry at least three or four times. It absolutely destroyed me and while I would recommend caution, I also cannot recommend it more.

Review: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

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