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Book: “House of Marionne” by J. Elle
Publishing Info: Razorbill, August 2023
Where Did I Get this Book: ARC from the author!
Where Can You Get this Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | IndieBound
Book Description: 17 year-old Quell has lived her entire life on the run. She and her mother have fled from city to city, in order to hide the deadly magic that flows through Quell’s veins.
Until someone discovers her dark secret.
To hide from the assassin hunting her, and keep her mother out of harm’s way, Quell reluctantly inducts into a debutante society of magical social elites called the Order that she never knew existed. If she can pass their three rites of membership, mastering their proper form of magic, she’ll be able to secretly bury her forbidden magic forever.
If caught, she will be killed.
But becoming the perfect debutante is a lot harder than Quell imagined, especially when there’s more than tutoring happening with Jordan, her brooding mentor and— assassin in training.
When Quell uncovers the deadly lengths the Order will go to defend its wealth and power, she’s forced to choose: embrace the dark magic she’s been running from her entire life or risk losing everything, and everyone, she’s grown to love.
Still, she fears the most formidable monster she’ll have to face is the one inside.
Brimming with ballgowns and betrayal, magic and mystery, decadence and darkness, House of Marionne is perfect for readers who crave morally gray characters, irresistible romance, dark academia, and a deeply intoxicating and original world.
Review: Well, I’m predictable at least. If you give me a beautiful cover and mention the words “dark academia” in your book summary, there’s a decent change I’ll check out your book. Also, “Bridgerton” season three has been taking foreeeever to come out, so the reference to ball gowns and high society is a nice little perk to my current interests. Unfortunately, this was one of those cases where a lot of excellent individual ingredients were thrown into a single pot, but the end result was a mess.
But, first, some of the good individual ingredients. I liked the writing style, overall. It did fall a bit on the younger side of YA for my own personal preferences, but everything ran smoothly and I had a clear idea of the scenes we were exploring and the characters making up this world. It seems silly to point out, but whenever a writer manages to tell a story without throwing me out of the narrative with awkward word choices or jilted or repetitive sentence structure, that’s already a great win, and Elle manages all of that here. Overall, I was pretty into the book in the first little bit. I also like a lot of the ideas that make up this world, but this is also where things began to fall apart a bit.
Once we get to the magical world of it all, we quickly discover there are several different societies with different histories and priorities of magic. Luckily for me, I always check out the end of a book, author’s note, etc. before really starting a book, so I was able to discover an appendix with the histories of all of these houses. However, unless a reader also happened to look at the back of the book like I did here, the world-building given in the actual text is very confusing and sparse. The details provided in the appendix were sometimes key to understanding some of the politics of this world, and by hiding this information at the end of the book, it presents a challenging reading experience.
There were also aspects of the world and magic that seemed fairly arbitrary. For example, the women have these tiaras that are essentially part of their heads? And the men have masks? And somehow these are connected to their magical abilities? It’s all very obscure and never explained in any way. Instead, it’s easy to see the author simply picturing this world in this way, and then plopping it down in the book without much support for the entire concept. There were other aspects of the world and magic like this that, as I went a long, became increasingly frustrating to just roll with.
I also really struggled with Quell. Fairly early on, she comes across as a very unserious person who isn’t appreciating the reality of her situation. We’re told that her mom has had them on the run her entire life to protect Quell from those who would harm her for her strange magic. But then the second they are separated, Quell chooses to run straight to the very people her mother has been running from. It’s a bizarre choice, and one that isn’t well supported unless Quell is just a dunderhead. From there, she proceeds to become a Mary Sue, quickly conquering magical tasks that others have been struggling with for years at the school. The were some legitimate twists and interesting choices that Quell makes towards the end of the book, but these were too few, too late.
As is often the case, if I struggle with the main character, I also struggle with the romance. For what it’s worth, I didn’t actively dislike the romantic interest. He was perfectly fine for the type of character he was supposed to be. But my increasing frustration with Quell made my interest in the progression of this romance to wane fairly quickly. Again, there were some interesting turns towards the end in this regard as well. But also again, it wasn’t enough to save my overall reading experience.
Rating 6: A frustrating main character and confusing world left me feeling fairly turned off on this YA fantasy.
Reader’s Advisory:
“House of Marionne” can be found on these Goodreads lists: YA Releases September 2023 and Can’t Wait Sci-Fi/Fantasy of 2023
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