Allison Saft

This book said chess, trauma, and enemies-to-lovers… and I said checkmate!

Okay but Immortal Game?? This was STRESSFUL in the best way.

We’re following Shea.... a literal chess prodigy who has spent YEARS destroying her competition for one goal: win this deadly fae tournament and save her sister from the King of the Otherworld. And when I say she’s driven?? I mean everything about her .....her anger, her pain, her identity ....... is tied to this one moment. Because she’s played him show more before… and she lost something she never got back.

So now it’s redemption. Or nothing. But of course… it’s never that simple.

Enter Ciara....her rival. A fae princess. Beautiful, chaotic, a little unpredictable… and VERY distracting when you’re supposed to be focused on survival. What starts as rivalry?? Slowly turns into this tension-filled, vulnerable, “oh no I understand you” connection that had me INVESTED.
The slow burn..... emotional walls..... peeling back layers as the stakes get higher......I was sat.

But what really got me was the sister relationship because everything Shea does is for her sister ..... the love, the anger, the grief.... and by the end.... I was emotional. Like truly… it HITS.

Add in deadly games, fae politics, found connections, and a heroine who is not always easy to like but SO real…

And yeah. This one stayed with me.

Thanks to St, MArtin's Press, Wedenesday Books, and NetGalley for this gifted ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Confession: emotionally unavailable but secretly soft characters own me. show less

3.3 stars

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

People say alchemy is many things.

The hala is a magical beast that means different things to different religions but every year there is a hunt to kill it, for over a century the last remaining hala has avoided death. When Margaret Welty sees the white fox in the woods, she knows the hunt is coming to her village and envisions it as an opportunity show more to get her mother to finally stay home with her. It's been three months since her alchemist mother has returned home on her search for the hala, her mother thinks if she kills the hala and burns it, she will be able to create a philosophers stone, that will then give her the power to bring Margaret's dead brother back.

What would it mean for a Sumic kid from the Fifth Ward and a Yu’adir girl from the countryside to win? It would mean nothing, and it would mean everything. It would—at least for one night, at least in this one nowhere town—force New Albion to reconsider what its heroes look like. To acknowledge its heritage, its identity, is not and was never homogenous.

Weston Winters comes from the poorer fifth ward in the city and after his father dies, he's trying to step-up and provide for his mother and sisters. He wants to become a politician but as the child of immigrant parents, many avenues are shut to him, so he's trying to become an alchemist, as they can become politicians. However, he's been dismissed by alchemists, that will even take a boy of his religion, all over the city and his last hope is Evelyn Welty in the countryside. When her daughter is less than welcoming, he fights to change her mind as he sees this as his last hope. When she comes to him with the idea to enter the hala hunt together, he agrees as this could be the last chance for either of them to achieve their dreams.

Clouds pass over the sun the moment she meets his gaze, the gold draining from her eyes as they narrow. Like this, she looks more wolf than girl— like some magic far wilder than alchemy runs through her.

A Far Wilder Magic was a magical realism story told in third person present tense that heavily used allegory to explore religious and immigration tensions. Margaret and Weston are shunned, bullied, and disadvantaged because of their respective religions. Margaret tends to keep her head down and try not to garner the main perpetrator, the local rich boy Jamie, attention while Weston loses his temper more and wants to talk back. Margaret just wants her mother to come home and grasp some of the happy home she used to have while her brother was alive and before her father left and Weston wants to enter politics to make a difference in the world and change societal views and structure towards immigrants. They're both seventeen, why this is tagged as young adult, and their emotional struggles show that at times but any age group could pick this up and enjoy the messaging and world.

Why should we let people like Jaime say what is and isn’t for us?

The story gets told both from Margaret and Weston's point-of-view but the third person present tense takes a little getting used to. It gives it an introspective and daydreaming quality that fits the messaging and fantasy side of the story but the icing of style the author takes with descriptions, The next two days pass like honey drizzled from the tip of a spoon.,that can fit in fantasy, bogged me down in its continual usage as the momentum of the story dragged in the second half. The synopsis made me think that the hala hunt was going to play a bigger part in the story but while it's the catalyst to get Margaret and Weston together, the event doesn't actually happen until the very back-end of the book, 90%. I thought Margaret and Weston swirled around with their thoughts and feelings repetitively too many times, their angst is understandable but around the 60% mark, I needed the pace to pick-up and the hala hunt to start.

Girls like her don’t get to dream. Girls like her get to survive. Most days, that’s enough. Today, she doesn’t think it is.

The surrounding characters and world, the setting seems to be a magical realism 1920-ish, added to the richness of the messaging and world. There were characters that young adults could easily identify, the bully, the ally, the enabler, and they came with shades of gray to make them, at times empathetic but also challenging. Weston's family, his mother and sisters, helped to provide some of the heart of the story and also worked as a mirror for Margaret to hold up to her own relationship with her mother; what unconditional love and trust is really about. I thought, even though she is only seventeen, Margaret held onto the idea that giving her mother the hala would make her show her love and stay with her, for a little too long, another kind of dragged out thread that hurt the pace in the second half for me.

All is One and One is All. At their core, they are all the same, all of them trying to survive.

Margaret and Weston's romance was a slow burn with a sweet payoff and I thought their future, with the best coonhound Trouble, was believable. There were some pacing problems for me in the second half and while the overly descriptive style fit the fantasy vibes, it started to feed into the bogged down feel. The messaging with religious and immigration intolerance, along with power not being corrupt but who is wielding it, was ingrained into the story with thought and the character struggles with unconditional love and trust infused the emotion. The hala brought a sprinkling of horror/suspense chills, the world setting provided magical realism and fantasy, and Margaret and Weston gave us the angst and love. show less

An alluring blend of folklore and magical intrigue, A Dark and Drowning Tide is a sapphic fantasy romance perfect for fans of Ava Reid and Freya Marske.

We are drawn into a world of fantasy, fairytale, and politics inspired by nineteenth-century Germany as Brunnestaad is still in its infancy after its king, Wilhelm, completed the campaign for unification his late father had started, unifying the different provinces under one kingdom. With unification tenuous and threats still beyond their show more borders, Wilhelm orders an expedition to find the Ursprung, a mythical spring that can grant unbridled magical power in order to secure his reign.

Enter Lorelai Kaskel: a folklorist tormented by guilt and grief at the murder of her younger brother, turned cynical by the path she chose that led her to be named co-leader of the expedition alongside her mentor, Professor Ziegler. Succeeding in finding the spring is her one chance at freedom—Lorelai is a Yevani, a ethnoreligious minority in the world of Brunnestaad who have been persecuted for centuries and whose movements are heavily restricted. She’s determined to see this through and be granted authority by the king to travel the world and fulfill her dream of becoming a naturalist.

This dream is ruptured when her mentor and the leader of the expedition is found murdered in the dead of night, all of her notes and journals vanished without a trace. Each member of the expedition is a suspect with their own hidden motives. Lorelai must work with her academic rival, Sylvia von Wolff, to solve the murder while assuming leadership of the expedition as more dangers lay ahead—mythical monsters, forests that rearrange themselves at night, and tensions simmering among the remaining members of the expedition.

I cannot reiterate enough that fantasy with unapologetically Jewish elements has become one of my favorite subgenres. I think part of it is that antisemitic tropes have been so deeply ingrained into the fabric of fantasy and fairytales, which is a key element of A Dark and Drowning Tide. As a folklorist, Lorelai is deeply familiar with the ways in which the Yevani have been portrayed through fables and fairytales. We are told many of them that echo our own—most notably The Jew Among Thorns, a fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm, becomes The Yeva in the Thorns. Saft and many other Jewish fantasy writers are intimately aware of this and use fantasy as a way to engage in a conversation about that history, which makes their writing all the more refreshing.

Allison Saft is a master in the craft of yearning and a well-built slow burn. Her writing style is exquisite, always deeply evocative and heart-wrenching as she unfurls the layers of her main characters until their bloody, still-beating hearts are exposed on paper. I fell in love with Lorelai and Sylvia von Wolff and found myself letting out guttural, inhuman noises at their frustrated yearning. (A tried and true sign of a masterful romance, if I may say so.) If you’re a fan of rivals to lovers and unabashed sapphic desire, this book will pull you under its current like a riptide and leave you gasping for air.

At its core, A Dark and Drowning Tide is a bruising love letter to folklore, an unabashed confrontation of the prejudices that lie at the center of many fairy tales, and a burning but tender love story. show less

I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher (Disney Books) for promotional purposes.

Prior to reading, I did not know a whole lot about Pixie Hollow/Disney Fairies. In the Disney Fairies universe, I had read Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg (which I didn’t even like) and The Trouble With Tink. I read both of these around the time they were originally published in 2005. I also only watched the first movie, Tinker Bell. So going into this book, I didn’t have any set show more expectations, nor did I have any idea who Milori was. With that being said, I was so impressed with this book!

This was a star crossed lovers fantasy romance and it was so beautifully executed. I loved Clarion and Milori together. They had such a strong emotional bond and I loved how they helped each other grow. Milori has my heart. I can see why Clarion fell in love with him. I also thought the supporting characters, particularly Petra and Artemis, were well crafted.

The writing was also gorgeous. The author’s writing style captured the magic and whimsy of Pixie Hollow and the heart and soul of the romance so well. The writing flowed effortlessly and added to the ethereal quality of the story.

Given that this story is about star crossed lovers, I knew the ending was going to be bittersweet, but I still loved it.

Overall, I was so enchanted by this fairy fantasy! If you’re a Disney fairies fan, be sure to check this one out. show less