Quick Synopsis – In a country divided between humans and witchers, Venus Stoneheart hustles as a brewer making illegal love potions to support her family. What Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her. As Venus crawls deeper into the corrupt underbelly of her city, the line between magic and power blurs, and it’s hard to tell who to trust

Song This Reminds Me Of – I Can’t Breathe – H.E.R.

Publication Date –March 5, 2024

Steamy Rating – 🌶🌶

Overall Rating – 3 out of 5 ⭐

Content Warnings – This book deals with themes of racism and there is a lot of blatant bigotry. There is some heavy kissing and one sex scene that is very mild. There are scenes the describe violence, gore, puking, blood, and child loss.

Review – This book was a little bit of a slow burn for me and took me a few chapters to really get into it. Venus is a tough-as-nails character who brews love potions in order to support her family. Magic has a cost, and being a brewer means there are horrific blowbacks from potions. Every time Venus brews, her potions have effects on her, such as broken bones or burned skin.

Regardless of the blowback, Venus is the main breadwinner of her family. Her mother, Clarissa, sacrificed her magic by breaking a magical vow, and her father is dead. When Clarissa is killed with iron bullets, Venus is sucked further into the underground trade of magic potions. The world is about to burst with humans demanding that witchers be on a public registry, a registry that would allow people to find them and likely kill them. Venus gets roped into a political scheme to poison senators with love potions to sway their opinions.

The story builds its tension beautifully, and while I did find some plot points fairly predictable, this book still had plenty of twists and turns. Venus’s little sister Janus can create portals and is determined to follow in her activist father’s footsteps. A lot of Venus’s motivation is to protect Janus. I thought the push-pull of their relationship was so realistic and well done. I also have a half-sister, and the dichotomy is similar.

Presley’s character was easily my favorite character. I thought the expression of their gender fluidity/non-binary expression was well done. Too many people get caught up in the idea of pronouns. Presley didn’t have a painful coming out or confrontation. They just were. I enjoyed that the author didn’t try to add an additional level of struggle.

I did think that the secondary storylines were a bit hobbled together. We understand Venus’s motivation isn’t political, but the other characters seem to have no motivation but power. It just didn’t flow well. I kept expecting like a villain info dump to better understand the power dynamics and struggles. The issues between humans and witchers also lacked nuance, which sort of made sense when looking at the parallels of racism.

Overall, I thought this was a good read, and I’d read the next in the series.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for the ARC.