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ruth_a's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Alcohol, Murder, and Blood
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail, Gun violence, Violence, and Sexual content
Minor: Pregnancy, Sexism, Child abuse, Infertility, Violence, Religious bigotry, Vomit, and Misogyny
craftysnailtail's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
I found this book easy and rather relaxing to read, even though it was decently violent at parts. The world and characters were fun and interesting, but I'm not sure if it's the sort of book I would recommend, especially with such a predictable ending. I found the sexual tension entirely over the top and thus mildly hilarious, but I'm sure that's partially due to my own orientation. Overall, I'm not upset I read it, but I also wasn't blown away.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Blood, Gore, Violence, Injury/Injury detail, and Sexual content
Moderate: Mental illness, Xenophobia, Chronic illness, Death of parent, War, Grief, Misogyny, Murder, Infertility, and Sexism
Minor: Hate crime, Alcohol, and Pregnancy
lady_valhella's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Pregnancy, Hate crime, Violence, Death of parent, and Murder
amberinpieces's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Classism, Sexual content, Violence, Pregnancy, Murder, Cursing, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Grief, Blood, Death of parent, Sexism, Death, and Alcohol
Minor: Medical content, Suicide, Drug use, Vomit, Gun violence, and War
skywhales's review
adventurous
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
good lord i need to reread the sequel to this immediately this had so much of my favorite shit in it!!! awesome worldbuilding and magic systems, a romantic relationship i genuinely enjoy, gender fuckery, HURGH. this would've been perfect if it wasn't for like three things.
first off tsira and jeckran OHHHH i loved them both SO much. dare i say it. reigboss and malewife. their banter with each other and other people and their relationship...while tsira is not technically a woman this is still everything i wanted in a m/f romance and more. they're so protective of each other and so silly and cute i just adore them.i will say that the pregnancy shit felt unnecessary to me. like we have a character as cool and groundbreaking and gender complicated as tsira and somehow she's STILL reduced to angst about being able to have a kid. (also...tmi perhaps but every time they had sex it was Her fucking Him so like...when did they do the baby making sex lol.) maybe i just am a little squicked by pregnancy. i wouldn't even have really minded that much if they ended up adopting a kid or something it just felt weird and annoying to me.
onna was sadly a little disappointing. from the synopsis she seemed like the kind of character made for me. i love you genius girls forever!!! i wish more time had been put into her learning to not apologize for being smart and not have to put themselves down for men all the time because as much as i love girls who stick out and don't fit in and are unquestionably talented it makes me so sad when they cover up those talents and apologize for everything and let themselves get condescended to by men. i thought this was going to be a thing that she'd get character development for but it didn't feel fully fleshed out. also she was SO boy crazy it was a fucking slog. every time some new man entered the picture it's all about how handsome he is and his nice hair and whatever the fuck else. it was deeply deeply boring to read and i had to skim it. i kept forgetting who the fuck haran even was because whenever he entered the picture onna's internal monologue got so insufferable. she was a very likable character whenever she wasn't trying to impress some dude i wish we got more of that.
loga was also kind of a miss for me. he had a lot of things i could like in a character but i HATED how he talked to onna. it felt so condescending a lot of the time and sometimes even kind of flirtatious?? which was fucking gross. it got so bad that at one point i wondered if the twist at the end of the book would be he was taking advantage of her the whole time but no i guess that's just what their relationship is like. rubbed me the wrong way.i also didn't like the implication that he and jeckran had a thing going on near the end. not because i think tsira/jeckran have to be monogamously in love obviously but i just really can't stand the "one person gets off on being a nuisance to the other one and the other one just grumbles and gets flustered about it" ship trope. it annoys me every single fucking time. it felt like they were introduced to each other way too late in the story to have any sort of meaningful rapport.
i think we also could have done with more women in the supporting cast. but that's neither here nor there.
the worldbuilding and the magic system and all that were completely top tier. exactly what i like to see in my fantasy worlds. this is why i need to reread the sequel and pay more attention to it. i want to know more about the different schools (it was mentioned onna was specializing in illusion but that got dropped kind of) and how magic's practiced in different places and. all of it basically. god i love you worldbuilding. the plot was fairly interesting, even if the ending was slightly unsatisfying. i also wish the two storylines had intersected earlier because it did get a little headachey to follow at times. overall though i liked it quite a bit for the most part. i really liked seeing the different cultures of the world and how they interacted.
this gets to go with carter and saint death's daughter in the "4 stars for some personal reasons but also has stuff that'll live rent free in my head for the foreseeable future" corner.
first off tsira and jeckran OHHHH i loved them both SO much. dare i say it. reigboss and malewife. their banter with each other and other people and their relationship...while tsira is not technically a woman this is still everything i wanted in a m/f romance and more. they're so protective of each other and so silly and cute i just adore them.
onna was sadly a little disappointing. from the synopsis she seemed like the kind of character made for me. i love you genius girls forever!!! i wish more time had been put into her learning to not apologize for being smart and not have to put themselves down for men all the time because as much as i love girls who stick out and don't fit in and are unquestionably talented it makes me so sad when they cover up those talents and apologize for everything and let themselves get condescended to by men. i thought this was going to be a thing that she'd get character development for but it didn't feel fully fleshed out. also she was SO boy crazy it was a fucking slog. every time some new man entered the picture it's all about how handsome he is and his nice hair and whatever the fuck else. it was deeply deeply boring to read and i had to skim it. i kept forgetting who the fuck haran even was because whenever he entered the picture onna's internal monologue got so insufferable. she was a very likable character whenever she wasn't trying to impress some dude i wish we got more of that.
loga was also kind of a miss for me. he had a lot of things i could like in a character but i HATED how he talked to onna. it felt so condescending a lot of the time and sometimes even kind of flirtatious?? which was fucking gross. it got so bad that at one point i wondered if the twist at the end of the book would be he was taking advantage of her the whole time but no i guess that's just what their relationship is like. rubbed me the wrong way.
i think we also could have done with more women in the supporting cast. but that's neither here nor there.
the worldbuilding and the magic system and all that were completely top tier. exactly what i like to see in my fantasy worlds. this is why i need to reread the sequel and pay more attention to it. i want to know more about the different schools (it was mentioned onna was specializing in illusion but that got dropped kind of) and how magic's practiced in different places and. all of it basically. god i love you worldbuilding. the plot was fairly interesting, even if the ending was slightly unsatisfying. i also wish the two storylines had intersected earlier because it did get a little headachey to follow at times. overall though i liked it quite a bit for the most part. i really liked seeing the different cultures of the world and how they interacted.
this gets to go with carter and saint death's daughter in the "4 stars for some personal reasons but also has stuff that'll live rent free in my head for the foreseeable future" corner.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent
Moderate: Misogyny and Violence
Minor: Pregnancy
wilybooklover's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
4.0
This was a really fun mashup of genres — part fantasy, part murder mystery, part romance, part coming-of-age. I really enjoyed the complex worldbuilding in this and how naturally it was incorporated into the story; no info-dumping or clumsy expositional dialogue here. It's a queernorm world which has some very interesting exploration of gender, sexuality, privilege, and cultural conflicts. I loved that the magical system was based on maths and all about creating logical formulae and definitions. I also enjoyed that it was a racially diverse world; Onna, one of the POV protagonists, seemed to be Black-coded, another main character was coded as East Asian, and several secondary characters were also POC/mixed race.
There were a few plotting issues. The two main plotlines were a little too disparate through most of the book and felt like they were kind of forced together towards the end rather than naturally converging. It was a bit jarring jumping straight from Onna's POV into Tsira's or Jeckran's. Some of the subplots seemed a bit pointless or didn't really make sense(e.g. Tsira's boxing matches, or the part where Mon Del Ras is killed off and an entire brothel was infiltrated, which didn't quite seem to jive with the killer's motives and methods). The villain was very predictable and easy to guess.
Overall though, this was great fun and very entertaining.
There were a few plotting issues. The two main plotlines were a little too disparate through most of the book and felt like they were kind of forced together towards the end rather than naturally converging. It was a bit jarring jumping straight from Onna's POV into Tsira's or Jeckran's. Some of the subplots seemed a bit pointless or didn't really make sense
Overall though, this was great fun and very entertaining.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Grief, Sexual content, Death of parent, Gore, Murder, Violence, and Death
Moderate: Classism, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, Child death, Gun violence, Misogyny, Sexism, Xenophobia, and Hate crime
Minor: Drug abuse, Animal death, Drug use, Suicide, War, Child abuse, and Pregnancy
ladythana's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Medical trauma, and Murder
Moderate: Sexual content, Hate crime, Death of parent, Violence, Sexism, Blood, and Vomit
Minor: Infertility and Pregnancy
charlieeee's review
emotional
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
Content Warnings
Minor: Vomit, Sexism, Pregnancy, Misogyny, Sexual content, and Xenophobia
booksthatburn's review against another edition
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
UNNATURAL MAGIC explores sexism and racism in a fantasy setting, following a human girl trying to learn magic when her brilliance is seen as threatening rather than extraordinary, a troll trying to figure out what she wants (given her mother's expectations) and the human man she finds in the snow and nurses back to health. Eventually, they all end up working to try and stop a series of murders of trolls by humans, which is a recently brutal escalation of long-simmering resentment between their two peoples.
Onna's storyline involves sexist expectations of her as a girl, not quite yet a woman. The whole reason she leaves her home country is because she was denied entry to a magical academy because the examiners dismissed her as a village girl. Her class was less of a factor than her gender, but the combination of the two meant they ignored her on a technicality.
This is the first book in what is thus far a set of two books in the same world. This one doesn’t seem to be specifically setting up anything to be resolved later, but I suspect that if and when I do read the next one I might realize things I didn’t notice on this read through. For now, this functions as a stand-alone book and can be treated as such. It resolves its own major plot points and while it gives an idea of what the characters may do next, it's in the broad strokes of the trajectories of their lives, not in way that specifically teases a sequel. There’s been a series of murders of trolls, spread across a pretty large area, but it seem that the humans of various regions don’t know that the problem is more widespread. While wealthy and well-connected trolls are at the highest levels of society with a great deal of control, individual trolls are being seemingly randomly murdered and their bodies mutilated for some unknown purpose. Onna becomes involved in the investigation as part of pursuing her magical studies. Tsira (who is half-troll and half-human) and the human she rescued end up working together to try and track down the murderers after someone close to Tsira is killed.
I love the relationship between Sara and her Pink (the human man she found in the snow). More than any individual facet of the dynamic between them, I like how they continually work at their relationship in a way that makes sense, but also shows that it’s some thing that takes work to maintain. They don’t always understand each other perfectly, but they end up finding a cadence that works for them and gives them the tools to deal with whatever happens.
The trolls have a system of social roles that are separate from gender in a way that doesn’t neatly map onto human conceptions of sex and gender. To them, a human system that’s based on anatomy seems completely nonsensical. I put a lot of thought into how to denote the kinds of queer rep rep contained in the book. Ultimately, I think the best analog for is Tsira as genderqueer and trans, because even though that definitely does not perfectly map onto how she would describe herself, it is the most analogous language I have to denote the kind of character she is and the way she is understood (or not) by the humans around her.
There's a lot of excellent worldbuilding. There’s little things like how those who do know of Onna's home, as she gets further away, know of it because it has a pencil eraser factory. Eventually, they only know about the factory and haven't heard of her village at all. I found that to be a fun detail, and her reaction to each new mention changes throughout the book as she hears it over and over. As for the broader worldbuilding, the more foundational element is the way that the magic is done through a form of advanced mathematics involving specify parameters for what will be affected by the spell. It’s a bit like making calculus magic, and the book never attempts to teach any particular magical equation because the process is the point, not the details. It means that in practical terms, the role that magic can play in the book is extremely flexible, able to be adapted for the needs of the plot, but also having limitations in a way that never feel contrived. I also noticed the while way the humans have sexism is a manner that I find broadly familiar, there are a little things that make it clear that it’s not meant to be a direct copy of the way the problems would play out in the real world. One of these little ways is that the human men are frequently described as wearing skirts. It's a little way of making it clear that this isn't just Earth with magic added, but a wholly different place which has broadly similar problems that play out in its own particular ways. It’s nearly the end of the book before the two main plot threads converge. It lends some sense of scale how wide flung the troll murders are, spanning countries and at least one sea voyage.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and will likely pick up the other book set in this world. This seems like a hidden gem, and I hope more people try it.
Onna's storyline involves sexist expectations of her as a girl, not quite yet a woman. The whole reason she leaves her home country is because she was denied entry to a magical academy because the examiners dismissed her as a village girl. Her class was less of a factor than her gender, but the combination of the two meant they ignored her on a technicality.
This is the first book in what is thus far a set of two books in the same world. This one doesn’t seem to be specifically setting up anything to be resolved later, but I suspect that if and when I do read the next one I might realize things I didn’t notice on this read through. For now, this functions as a stand-alone book and can be treated as such. It resolves its own major plot points and while it gives an idea of what the characters may do next, it's in the broad strokes of the trajectories of their lives, not in way that specifically teases a sequel. There’s been a series of murders of trolls, spread across a pretty large area, but it seem that the humans of various regions don’t know that the problem is more widespread. While wealthy and well-connected trolls are at the highest levels of society with a great deal of control, individual trolls are being seemingly randomly murdered and their bodies mutilated for some unknown purpose. Onna becomes involved in the investigation as part of pursuing her magical studies. Tsira (who is half-troll and half-human) and the human she rescued end up working together to try and track down the murderers after someone close to Tsira is killed.
I love the relationship between Sara and her Pink (the human man she found in the snow). More than any individual facet of the dynamic between them, I like how they continually work at their relationship in a way that makes sense, but also shows that it’s some thing that takes work to maintain. They don’t always understand each other perfectly, but they end up finding a cadence that works for them and gives them the tools to deal with whatever happens.
The trolls have a system of social roles that are separate from gender in a way that doesn’t neatly map onto human conceptions of sex and gender. To them, a human system that’s based on anatomy seems completely nonsensical. I put a lot of thought into how to denote the kinds of queer rep rep contained in the book. Ultimately, I think the best analog for is Tsira as genderqueer and trans, because even though that definitely does not perfectly map onto how she would describe herself, it is the most analogous language I have to denote the kind of character she is and the way she is understood (or not) by the humans around her.
There's a lot of excellent worldbuilding. There’s little things like how those who do know of Onna's home, as she gets further away, know of it because it has a pencil eraser factory. Eventually, they only know about the factory and haven't heard of her village at all. I found that to be a fun detail, and her reaction to each new mention changes throughout the book as she hears it over and over. As for the broader worldbuilding, the more foundational element is the way that the magic is done through a form of advanced mathematics involving specify parameters for what will be affected by the spell. It’s a bit like making calculus magic, and the book never attempts to teach any particular magical equation because the process is the point, not the details. It means that in practical terms, the role that magic can play in the book is extremely flexible, able to be adapted for the needs of the plot, but also having limitations in a way that never feel contrived. I also noticed the while way the humans have sexism is a manner that I find broadly familiar, there are a little things that make it clear that it’s not meant to be a direct copy of the way the problems would play out in the real world. One of these little ways is that the human men are frequently described as wearing skirts. It's a little way of making it clear that this isn't just Earth with magic added, but a wholly different place which has broadly similar problems that play out in its own particular ways. It’s nearly the end of the book before the two main plot threads converge. It lends some sense of scale how wide flung the troll murders are, spanning countries and at least one sea voyage.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and will likely pick up the other book set in this world. This seems like a hidden gem, and I hope more people try it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Hate crime, Racism, Sexism, Death, Gore, Grief, Blood, Classism, and Violence
Moderate: Pregnancy, Racial slurs, Sexual content, Alcohol, Animal death, Child abuse, Child death, Chronic illness, Confinement, Medical content, Fire/Fire injury, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Religious bigotry, and Vomit
Minor: Drug abuse, Infertility, Physical abuse, Suicide, War, Drug use, and Excrement
tinyflame4's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Medical trauma, and Death of parent
Moderate: Blood, Violence, Hate crime, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Racism, Bullying, Cursing, Hate crime, Pregnancy, Religious bigotry, and Sexism