2023/147: Ink Blood Sister Scribe — Emma Torzs

At first each bookstore felt magical. Not the kind of magic Esther had grown up with but the kind she’d read about in novels, the kind that was all possibility, the chance that with one right turn in the forest or one fateful conversation with an old woman a person’s life might change forever. [loc. 3614]

The Kalotay sisters haven't seen one another for years. Esther is working in the Antarctic as a electrician, while her half-sister Joanna lives in a hidden house in Vermont, alone since the death of their father, who was killed by a book.

This is a world where magic is a closely-guarded secret, and spells are inscribed in books using ink made of blood and herbs. The talent for magic runs in families -- Joanna can sense it in the books she guards, though Esther is curiously immune -- and can be detected by other magic users. Esther was told never to stay in the same place for more than a year: 'you must leave on November 2 and keep moving for twenty-four hours, or the people who killed your mother will come for you'. But she's in love with a girl named Pearl, and doesn't want to go. Joanna, meanwhile, lives a solitary life, reading historical romances: there's a stray cat that comes looking for food, and she visits her mother in town, but she's achingly lonely.

As is Nicholas, the third of the viewpoint narrators, despite the near-constant presence of his bodyguard Collins, and the company of his uncle Richard, and of Maram, Richard's partner and Nicholas' former tutor. Nicholas is heir to the Library, a secret thaumocracy of magic-users: he's also a powerful Scribe, writing spells to order with his own blood. He lives a life of immense privilege but very little freedom. It's for his own protection, says Uncle Richard: wasn't Nicholas kidnapped as an adolescent, and didn't he lose an eye?

The three protagonists' stories converge, but the paths are twisty and the intersections unpredictable: the denouement, despite a slowing of the plot as all the convolutions are exposed, is highly satisfying, and open enough to admit a sequel. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a pleasure to read, full of inventive turns of phrase ('He’d never felt so passionately all-caps about another person') and vivid descriptions -- of a dark garden in Vermont, of a drive through London at night, of Antarctic skies. It reminded me, in atmosphere, of The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, but the tone is less cynical and the characters less antagonistic, less competitive. An intriguing debut.