Review - The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

A quick note before I begin: I'm going to go into quite a lot of detail in this review, so it will contain a discussion of the events of the novel. If you're looking to go into the book without spoilers (which I'd recommend if you are intending to read it, this book is best read when you don't know what's going on), don't read this review.

The Raven Scholar is the first book in a fantasy trilogy. This book centres around the titular character, a woman named Neema who has built a life in the court of the now-ageing Emperor, and how she's catapulted from something lonely and predictable into something far bigger than she's prepared to handle: the competition over who will succeed the throne.

By the time this review ends, you'll probably get the impression that I don't like this book very much, and it's certainly not to my tastes. What's more accurate to say is this book took me on a journey, and my dislike of it says far more about my tastes than it does about the quality of this book.

I want to be clear: a lot of people absolutely adore this book. I had high expectations before going in (partially because this was the penultimate book I'm reading for the Hugo Awards, where the standard for fantasy especially has been high) - I'd seen people talking about this book as one of the best works of SFF published in the last five years. Given that I get a decent chunk of my book recs from Bluesky and half the SFF readers (or perhaps just the loudest readers) on Bluesky seem to think that modern SFF is bad, this had me interested.

For the first hundred pages or so, I'll admit to being bored. I felt like the book was tearing me in several different directions and was determined to set up a scenario in which I cared about the actions and opinions of almost no characters. Delivering its initial worldbuilding infodump through a teenager, I was uncompelled (more on the worldbuilding later) and then a little disgruntled when it pushed me through a perspective change and then an eight year time skip, followed by several chapters which seemed to have the express purpose of making me dislike nearly every supporting character and resign myself to the protagonist's misery for the next five hundred-odd pages.

But I respected the process. Sometimes there's a big chunky fantasy book and it has lots of lore. Not my thing, but if people were shouting its praises, surely the payoff was good, right?

Slowly, the book began to convince me. The characters had layers, and there was history baked into their actions set up by the eight year time skip. The book's brief time in Yana's head had set up exactly what it needed to: I cared about her. Eight years later, her death still shadowed so much, and both the events and silence surrounding it did a lot to induce an oppressive atmosphere. The characters touched by her death were a much-needed anchor in the impressively large cast. I liked it; I liked it a lot. (The rest of the history and politics beyond this event felt flimsier to me, but again; we'll get into it later.)

And then the plot started punching. The intrigue! The twists and turns! When the plot revealed - through the notes left behind by a murdered scholar - the suspicions that had gotten her killed, I messaged a friend to tell him: "this book reminds me of yuwu"; the fandom-accepted shorthand for a serialised work of fiction named Remnants of Filth, which is one of my favourite works of fiction of all time. Specifically, I was thinking of the way it invoked courtly intrigue for its plot: a machine of power that necessitates deception and chiefly spreads pain. The function of the throne and the secrecy surrounding it excited me, and I was so, so ready to continue the book.

Yet, as the book drew to a close, I wasn't enjoying it. It wasn't one moment, it wasn't one thing. It was a sort of progression of things, each of them probably fine enough on their own, things I could have overlooked if they were isolated. Together, they collated into what I'd call a loss of faith in the book's ability to speak to me about things I wanted to read about.

The first issue I had, cutting through the whole piece, was the pantheon. In some ways, it was benign; flavour more than anything. But as the book progressed, it became ever-clearer that the narrative was serious about its character-animal typecasting. Within the logic of the book, it was fun, but the moment I started explaining it to my partner to try and put my finger on what I didn't like about the worldbuilding, it fell apart. What do you mean all these people pick an animal at the age of sixteen and it determines their job and is meant to match their temperament (also, what do you mean the black character is the raven, and the fox character is a redhead). Didn't we leave this behind in the 2010s with Divergent and associated 'what if we were all put in boxes' fiction?

To be completely fair to the book, it was unclear if this obsession with typecasting was restricted to the governing elites or if it spread across the whole of the setting. I can imagine that it's setting up threads to be picked up in further entries in the trilogy about the harm and exploitation that can come with pigeonholing people and making it harder to talk to those who think differently to them. I'm sure, in book three of the trilogy published in 2030 or something similar, that this will pay off deliciously. In this book, it wasn't there. Every single animal-affiliated character was on-type, and each invocation of people as a kind of singularity (while simultaneously making it clear that multiple of the animal gods themselves were a collective formed of competing impulses) grated more the further the book went on.

My other problem is a little thornier, and difficult to express without potentially making a fool of myself. I don't think this was intentional and I may well have been imagining some of it, but I had an issue with the way this book handled disability.

The Emperor's face is drooping, once his deception is revealed. The cost of his magic isn't as the text says - that he is losing himself - but that he is losing his ability to control what his true face looks like. The intention of these descriptions, I think, is body horror. But as I read about one side of his face losing form, or his mouth hanging open, I was left instead with the impression of someone having a stroke, or someone who otherwise doesn't have the ability to fully control their facial muscles. The villain - the villain so cartoonishly evil I all but lost interest in what he said or thought because I already knew it would be the worst possible thing - was marked, was punished, by facial difference. Huh.

The High Scholar, our lonely protagonist, who is so particular. She's so focused on the things she's most interested in, to the exclusion of all else. She excels at studying the driest of subject matters; she doesn't mind doing tasks that no one else can tolerate because she finds their particularity interesting. She's shunned for her social class, partially, but there's the other edge to it too: she'll never fit because she's boring. When she talks to people, they can't even bother to politely listen to her infodump. I wasn't all that far through the book when I told a friend "I don't really like the book as a whole but I love that the empire runs on competent autistic people" because I quickly read that into Neema's struggles. Except it becomes clear, a little later, that her particularity and precision is so annoying that once she encounters someone else like her in the Solitary Raven, anything that put up a barrier between her and others socially seems to just disappear. The book doesn't make a conscious connection between these two events, but looking back on it, I noticed. Nothing worse than the person who struggles to connect with their peers, huh?

(This is not the most charitable possible reading of Neema specifically, and I understand that. This section is about picking out a theme.)

The High Commander is obsessed with order and efficiency, or so they say. He doesn't have a heart. Be particular in your dealings with him, because he values only what's useful to him. He's not interested in the fanciful trappings of your court. (Of course, he has a softer spot for people like him, like Neema. He feels a keen kinship with animals, too.) When I was excited that the empire ran on autistic people, I'd picked up something like neurodiversity coding in Vabras, too. Turns out everything that made him tick, everything that set him apart from high society as a whole, was just what made him into a fascist who supported mass killing in the name of nebulously defined stability. Never mind that Andren's work is defined by corruption and works only because of exploiting everything that was wrong with the court. This, more than anything, was the moment that left a bad taste in my mouth; the moment when it became clear that Hodgson was intent on depicting a character I enjoyed for his specific qualities as a villain because he held those qualities I liked so much.

And then there's Nisthala, the sick, hidden teenager, suffering extensively at the hands of an illness her mother decided shouldn't be cured for a full seven years. As a result of the illness that left her housebound and constantly in pain, her magical cure has made her stronger than anyone else in her position. I always feel weird about magical cures of any kind, but the combination of that and then depicting her preventable suffering as necessary because suffering through her chronic illness made her better than others... nope nope not for me.

Like I said earlier: alone, I might have been a little disgruntled at this, but together I find it uncomfortable. Hodgson surely didn't mean to be ableist in these depictions; maybe depicting disability wasn't even the intention in all cases! But it was the reading I took, and I didn't like what the story told me about what I read.

I did have one last problem with the book, but that one's entirely on me. From the reading I've done over the last year or so, I've come to understand that I don't really like books in a series. I don't like reaching the end of a book only to find that fewer things are resolved than at the beginning (other than knowledge), that almost everyone is in a worse spot, and that the stakes have been heightened to the skies for the protagonist to battle even greater odds next time around. I prefer my stakes more personal, which is partially why I started to lose interest when the book lurched ever closer to direct action by the 'gods'. It's a personal preference rather than a flaw in the book itself, but it did contribute to my feelings towards the end.

To be clear: I loved the relationships in this book, from romantic and platonic to its depiction of alliances and political scrambling and pure enmity. I loved the characters. The narrative framing device was fun, and the way it played with perspective was great. I liked that it didn't shy from the horror of what it was depicting. Every time a new piece of information slotted into something mentioned in the past, it was satisfying to see the connection. I enjoyed its take on magic, and myth, and there were some fascinating implications in some of the worldbuilding regarding the origin of the world.

And yet, I do not think I liked this book. It's a shame, because I wanted it to speak to me in the way it's so clearly spoken to others.