This past week, I finished Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L Wang. It took me a few days to ruminate on it. Then I could come and talk about it. Welcome to my review of one of the best books I’ve read in recent months.
The book was published in July of 2023 and is around 450 pages. I read it as an e-book, allowing me to annotate and transfer my highlights to Goodreads. I read it over 3 days, and it was tough to put down. If you’re a fan of dark academia, a strong female protagonist, and a heavy bedrock of transferable social issues, you would like this book.
I do not like giving spoilers in reviews, but I would like to expound on some of the moral issues this book presents. If you have not read this book and would like to, I would tread further cautiously.
The setting begins with the premise. It centers on a Utopian city called Tiran, which is formed with magic and relies heavily on magical sources to keep running. Surrounding the city is a two-mile-wide barrier called The Blight, which draws on living sources and dissolves man and beast alike. The book starts off strong with presenting the dangerous area that this zone is, showing heartbreak and death within a few pages of the book starting. It draws you in right away, interested in knowing more.
One of the main characters, Thomil (Tome-eel), is introduced in this introduction, but after that, he fades to the back. I’ll get to him in a moment.
The main character the book centers on is Sciona (SciO-na), a young woman petitioning to enter an elite collegiate research fraternity of mages. Emphasis on the fraternity, she is the only woman who has proved herself worthy of entering. She is very sure of her abilities and talent, having studied under one of the mages on the council who tests for admission. She knows that won’t afford her any advantage, and the odds are stacked against her. However, you quickly sense that she has an arrogant streak and she is confident to the point of being haughty. I like a flawed main character, and seeing that she isn’t without her foibles makes her a little more relatable. You cheer for her a little more as she goes up against the male-centered Magistry.
Right off the bat, Sciona is up against a massive amount of misogyny. Her colleagues doubt her abilities, insinuating she came in almost under affirmative action and her talents didn’t amount to much. They go out of their way to make her feel unwelcome. Trigger warning: There is a scene where a sexual assault attempt is made. They refuse to provide her with resources like qualified research assistants. Instead, they insult her by giving her an unassuming janitor as an assistant.
Remember Thomil? (Tome-Eel) He’s the janitor. This is several years after he was first introduced. He is in the servile class called the Kwen, who are considered lower caste. No one in the Magistry thinks he’s smart, but he’s been around a while and has picked up on quite a bit while he cleans, which proves to be a tremendous asset for Sciona. He also is extremely aware of the unfair system that he and other Kwen inhabitants of Tiran are subjected to, and how disposable the Kwen people is considered.
Together, Sciona and Thomil work together to solve her assignment, and Sciona is confronted with far more than she bargained for. She is smacked in the face with how privileged she is, and how much her magic costs to cast. I think Wang did a good job in devastating her with this knowledge. For some books, I can’t say a character had an appropriate level reaction to horrific knowledge, but Scionas anguish is visceral. I felt it while I read.
I should interrupt myself with my thoughts on the magic system. It seems a little foreign to a reader used to a traditional system like point a wand and say choice words, but you understand it after the first few chapters. It is one of the more unique magic systems I’ve seen, using a tool akin to a typewriter and plotting specific words and locations on that device, specifying to the magic aerial how much power you need, what you need to do, and where you need the power to go. I heard other readers compare it to coding, and I completely agree, it’s like magic Python!
I said I wouldn’t give you spoilers, and I won’t. However, the reason this book is so captivating is because Wang pulls no punches in how she comments on the society of Terin and how the caste system is unfair. It is an unfortunate allegory, but you can see parallels in modern American society. We may have made progress as a whole, but the misogyny in academia is still very real, and the entitlement and racism of a certain echelon translated very clearly from this book to real life.
The ending of this book was a fantastic and thrilling wrap, broad and dramatic in scope. It concludes itself in a satisfying and neat way, with relatively few questions. It did leave me feeling sad in a sacrificial way but M.L Wang pulls at the heartstrings very well. All in all, I am very ready to read whatever she puts out next, I am sure she will knock it out of the park once again.
Want a copy for yourself? Get yours here! I am an affiliate with Bookshop.org, a shop that supports independent bookstores worldwide. The bookstore I support is a local shop in Milwaukee called Rooted MKE, a BIPOC-owned shop that focuses on children’s literature and literacy.
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