Review: Advanced Alchemy: A Novel

Advanced Alchemy: A Novel by Livvy Jane Baker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Violet is a student alchemist in her final year, which involves outplacement, in her case in the back end of nowhere. Possibly this has something to do with how she blew up part of the chemistry lab last year and is, in general, rebellious and uncooperative, despite having worked her way up from the slums by sheer determination and so being very invested in passing.

She also has been saddled with a paladin-in-training, Viessa, as a bodyguard and minder. They have an instant odd-couple dynamic, Violet being the slobby one and the paladin the neat freak, naturally. It's classic chaos vs order. A chaotic alchemist does raise some questions, since it would seem to require a good deal of precision and discipline, especially for someone who had to teach herself magic from scratch without even the advantage of inheriting any from an ancestor, but... people are complex, and it wasn't enough of a contradiction to break my suspension of disbelief.

Violet is surprised and a little disturbed, given how much she resents Viessa and finds her irritating, to find that she's also attracted to her. I was a lot less surprised, since it seems like Violet would give a tree a second look if it was approximately woman-shaped; she's lustful and promiscuous, as well as sweary and given to acts of poor judgement, none of which endeared her to me particularly. Viessa is rigid and naive (though, as it turns out, committed to principle rather than just a blind rule-follower), but also, for some reason, is attracted to Violet, again despite being intensely irritated by her. I have a quirk where I need to like both people in a couple in order to care whether they end up together, and in this case I didn't like either of them much at the beginning. Viessa did gradually grow on me, as her mistakes and weaknesses humanised her, and Violet, the main character, had a considerable character arc in which she learned and grew, so eventually I was on board with the ship - though I still had doubts about its practical feasibility by the end.

The author's reach exceeds her grasp when it comes to vocabulary, unfortunately, with a good many errors, one or two of them quite basic. I'll mention them to the publisher (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review) and hopefully they will be fixed; the editing is otherwise mostly clean, apart from an occasional odd phrasing, some incorrect dialog punctuation and one chapter where the past perfect tense goes missing for a while. She has an odd habit of separating two sentences with a colon, too, but that's not wrong, just unusual.

On the upside, the writing is wryly funny in just the way I enjoy, and the story is a decent cozy-adjacent fantasy in which two ill-assorted people have to learn to work together and get along, and in which Violet learns to tame her more extreme chaotic tendencies. Towards the end, I found it powerfully engaging, with strong emotional beats. Worldbuilding in cozy and romantasy tends to be weak, often barely enough to allow the plot to happen (if that), but here some thought has gone into the world and the magic system. I didn't end up believing the source of the curse on the moor, though; it seemed (in terms of the world that had been described) too much effect in proportion to the cause. As a minor point, I'm also not sure how the person on the left side of the cover could lend the person on the right side her spare riding trousers and have them fit.

While this is (like so much fantasy these days) marketed in part as cozy, it's not deeply cozy, and I'm not tagging it as such.

Balancing out the strengths and weaknesses, for me this is a three-star book; good, but with some significant flaws. It's good enough that I'd consider reading a sequel or other books from the author, but flawed enough that I'd approach them cautiously.

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