Reviews with content warning for Self harm - One For My Enemy

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One For My Enemy by Olivie Blake

2 reviews

savvyrosereads's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Set in present day Manhattan, One for My Enemy is a Romeo and Juliet retelling featuring two rival witch clans and the bloody tension between them.

This is my first Olivie Blake novel, but it absolutely will not be my last! I LOVED the writing of this one, which is absolutely gorgeous and filled with so many incredible and whip-smart lines. I also loved the characters—especially Marya and Sasha—and thought their story unwound with so much care and precision it left me in awe and wishing I could one day write something anywhere close to this good.

In terms of the plot itself, I thought this was a super unique and entertaining take on Romeo and Juliet (which, admittedly, is not a story I’m a huge fan of in the original but is certainly a classic framework). I did find the middle part of this one a tiny bit slow, but in the end the payoff was very worth it!

Recommended to anyone, but especially if you like: classic retellings; forbidden love; witchy stories

CW: Blood/death/violence, suicide/self-harm

Content Warnings

bookishmillennial's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated

disclaimer if you’ve read other reviews by me and are noticing a pattern: You’re correct that I don’t really give starred reviews because I don’t like leaving them. Most often, I will only leave them if I vehemently despised a book.

I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all. Everyone’s reading experiences are subjective, so I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not, regardless if I add stars or not. Find me on Instagram: @bookish.millennial or tiktok: @bookishmillennial

premise:

urban fantasy set in New York City, NY & loose modern retelling of Romeo & Juliet with Russian/Slavic folklore weaved in
third-person POV, which mostly follows ~4 main characters?
two rival families begin a war with the other for you know, the usual: vengeance, pride, scorned egos, power, control, etc.
Baba Yaga and her seven Antonova daughters (most notable are eldest Marya/Masha & youngest Sasha) run an apothecary which sells intoxicants/elixirs
crime boss Koschei the Deathless and his three Federov sons -Dimitri, Roman, & Lev- makes a living out of extortion, what a guy!
Marya finds out that someone has been reselling their products at a higher price, and she comes to exact revenge on Dimitri, her ex-love and who she accuses of the crime
Lev and Sasha unknowingly bump into each other and begin a forbidden romance
there is a faerie named Bryn/The Bridge who makes deals, lots of miscommunication happens, and chaos ensues
this is closed-door / fade-to-black
cw: violence, murder, gaslighting, toxic relationship, toxic parent/child dynamic

thoughts:
I *think* this is my favorite book by Olivie Blake (not including her non-magical teen romance/coming of age book My Mechanical Romance!!!) I thoroughly enjoyed the angst, longing, and devastation of it all! Olivie is a beautiful writer, and I did highlight SO much of this book.

I know they weren't the primary players, and that Marya was very much an antagonist, but I have said it before, and I will say it again: I support women's wrongs !!! I loved how angry, unpredictable, and exacting she was. Maybe I'm projecting my mommy issues onto her, but I love the trope of realizing your parents ain't shit! Is that the official name? Idk, but I co-sign any book with this trope hehehe. Marya and Dimitri were hell bent on breaking generational trauma, and who can deny them that?!

In the beginning, I was a bit of a simp for Lev, because he was just so quick-witted and confident (in a sexy way, not in a "let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence cishet gross way"). I thought Sasha was also hilarious; her energy was giving "that don't impress me much" but much more calm, cool, and collected. I loved that the two youngest siblings were given a chance to reflect on their family legacies at a much younger age than their elder siblings, and that they recognized the privilege in that. in realizing they could take a different path.

While there were so many hits in this one for me, there were also a *few* misses so please forgive me but the insufferable Virgo in me must point them out! I still don't fully understand the magic system, and I wish it had been introduced earlier in the book, because the first half of the book could probably pass as contemporary new adult fiction (almost zero magic detected!).

I needed a bit more explanation on how people were brought back to life, or simply shown the scenes of it happening. You know in The Vampire Diaries, when someone died, their friends could travel to the underworld, and bring them back? Sure, that's *wild* and I still had some questions, but it made sense and was explained. I feel like I somehow was missing out on context that I was supposed to know about the world, witches, or afterlife that I simply never was looped in on? What kind of magic, spell, or world-building rule was present so that they could bring the person back to life?! It was confusing, and I wish it had been fleshed out more. It could have replaced maybe 15% of the flowery, verbose prose? (I love her writing, but I'm just saying we could've switched them out!)

quotations that stood out to me:
It was their usual détente: Someday. Not today, but someday.

My daughters are diamonds, Yaga so often said. Nothing is more beautiful. Nothing shines brighter. And most importantly, nothing will break them.

This is the important thing, after all: nobody fears a beautiful woman. They revere her, worship her, sing praises to her—but nobody fears her, even when they should.

Not just anyone could touch Masha. She was full of sharp edges; always a pointy little thing, a rose lined with thorns. Nobody got close to Masha unless she had already let them.

She could no longer live a quiet life, nor have any quiet success; she would need to be powerful, so powerful she could not be ignored, and so, with Masha at her side, she remade her reputation from that of Marya Antonova, the quiet, dutiful wife of the Borough witch Antonov, to simply that of Baba Yaga, shrugging on a new and undeniable skin. Everyone knew Yaga’s intoxicants were the best, slicing out a piece of Koschei’s profits when they turned to her instead, but what could he do? At best, he was only a very apt middleman. Koschei procured products; he didn’t make them. He and his sons ...more

There would never be another love for Masha like the one she’d had for Dima, and rightly so. That love had made her soft, and like her mother, Masha endured no softness.

SASHA: do people ever tell you you’re impossible? LEV: from time to time LEV: I take it as a compliment LEV: don’t you? it’s so easy to be possible LEV: seems silly to limit myself to that SASHA: you’re impossible LEV: stop LEV: I’m blushing

SASHA: I honestly don’t know what to say to any of this LEV: good LEV: personally I like the idea of rendering you speechless

SASHA: hate to break it to you but you left “too eager” about two hours ago and now you’re somewhere in the realm of “zealously available”

“I’m not here for a one-night stand, Sasha,” he told her. “The story we’re writing? It has chapters. Installments. I don’t want once.”

“You’re nothing until somebody wants you dead, Bridge, remember that,” she informed him, pulling her coat over her shoulders. “Until then, you’ve done absolutely nothing worth a damn.”

For better or worse, she had always shared everything with Dimitri—until the day she’d shared nothing at all.

“I remember how joy looked on you, Masha. I remember life, and I don’t see it now. I certainly didn’t see it when I saw you last, carrying out your mother’s wrath—so tell me, are you happy? Being the great Marya Antonova,”

“We are only witches, Dima. Not gods.”

To believe in destiny, one must also believe in succession. If the world is ruled by predetermination, then it must also be ordered, measured, paced out from first to last: If this, then this.

How was it possible to feel such greatness in one’s bones and yet be kept from it by some inconsequentiality of birth?

But Dimitri Fedorov, like all heroes, had one near-fatal flaw.

“I am only for you,”

At best, Dimitri Fedorov was Marya Antonova’s greatest weakness. At worst, she was his.

It was a promise and a threat, a declaration of hierarchy, and it tore at the ties between brothers.

Could he really taste so sweet, being her enemy? There was no doubt that he was, now and always, and maybe the scathing cosmic joke of it all was that instinctively, like muscle memory, she’d known it all along.

“Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?” she asked him softly. He hesitated. “This isn’t the story I wanted for us.” “It never is,” replied Sasha, who knew better.

but if I can only have you as a fire, Sasha, as a flame of what you are, then I want you to burn for me.

“I’m your enemy in the morning,” he whispered. Fair warning. His hand traced the shape of her scapula, fingers brushing the length of her spine and then curling upward, possessive. “I’m your enemy tonight,” she said, and kissed him again.

“What does it mean to be a Fedorov son if we destroy ourselves in the process?” Dimitri asked, and his expression was nothing Lev had ever seen on his face before. “What does it mean to be this family or that, if loss is the only thing that comes from it?”

“Do you really believe people are so isolated that when they’re gone, nothing grows in their place? To really kill something, you have to kill everything. You have to raze it to the ground.”

Blood for blood. The most elementary of principles. The most ancient of reparations.

“Roman Fedorov is only Koschei’s blade. A knife doesn’t wield itself.”

“No ifs,” Koschei said, cutting him off. “The devil lounges in the word if, Roma. The circumstances of our conditions are not for us to ponder without slowly losing our minds.”

“Strength comes from struggle,” Marya said. “Each time we bid farewell to a piece of ourselves we become different than we were. But each time we rise again in the morning, it’s a victory,”

She was fantasy incarnate, and she had chosen him.

People believe shadows represent darkness, but that isn’t technically true. For one thing, a shadow can’t exist without light. A shadow, which is itself a slice of darkness, can only be seen when light persists, which is to say it can only be seen in the context of something brighter.

The trouble was always in the consequences, not the doing.

She was soft and unbending, delicate and impossible in his hands. She was power, and powerful, and full of little intricacies that he felt with a sudden thrill of fear he’d never fully know because it would be like counting the stars, like naming grains of sand, and there could never possibly be enough time for any of it.

“I’m glad your wisdom gives you peace, Mama. Even if it came at the price of my pain.”

“You do forget. You forget that while I have always been on your side, you have never truly been on mine.”

If it was a dream, he seemed to say, then let it end in the morning. Let the sun do its worst.

Had anyone ever given Marya Antonova as much as she had given them? He suspected the answer was no.

Still, there was a moment, Lev knew, as he stepped out onto the sidewalk, when he could see the blend of night and day—the sun, the moon, and the stars. There was a moment when all of it aligned, and he didn’t want to miss it.

Content Warnings

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