“A woman died today. A Talented woman. She died because she was in love and the Talented are forbidden from feeling such human emotions. They mustn’t be allowed to be human, lest we face the reality that we’re exploiting other humans for little conveniences like brights and trams.”

CW for this review: child death, femicides.

The book begins with a child’s mutilated body and this almost deterred me from the rest of the book. Not for the grim image, but because I initially thought it was gender related as it was the body of a girl. Where I’m from, femicides are an everyday reality and their bodies are found in similar fashion but adding signs of sexual violence. This event turns something in our MCs head and sparks an investigation that will change his whole reality that not even the imprisonment of his own son for non-compliance caused.

The Dominion is a bleak, bleak world, and there are multiple other dead children in this novel. I appreciated the author’s note about taking care of your mental health first, even if it means skipping this book completely.

I’ll confess it took me over 100 pages to really get immersed in the story. It was confusing at times when there are so many characters (that’s coming from an epic fantasy reader) and they’re sometimes called by first name, last name, or even title.

Magic users are called either Talented or Tainted, depending on who mentions them, and they are exploited for their abilities for the benefit of the privileged. This fuels the commentary on power inequality and how colonizers get to rewrite history.

This book has a meticulously-built world full of well-fleshed morally gray characters as complicated as real people. Amongst the interesting cast you’ll find: a smooth-talker that’s a bit of an ass, a hero who falls to his violent instincts, an adulterer, a law-breaker on the run, and a woman who fails to recognize her dehumanization of Talented people in the name of the Law.

I love romantic subplots, but we get into this relationship at a strange point where they already know each other and have feelings for each other but are little more than acquaintances, so it took me a couple of sexually-charged scenes to get on board. They were already sharing romantic moments but still referring to each other by last name. Oh, and one of these moments was right after describing a mangled child’s body, in case you weren’t sure how dreary the setting is.

Every conflict feels like a priority, which could have been overwhelming but instead it feeds the sense of urgency that keeps you glued to the page, every thread carefully weaving towards a rewarding climax. It’s a well-rounded story that that elicits all kinds of emotions.