In Fourspires, familiars exist to serve their arcanists, wresting power from bone, botanicals, blood, and stone until overexertion kills them. Taro, a bone familiar with an “unhealthy obsession with black eye liner” and an “attitude problem,” dreams of running away with Nixie, the love of her life. Nixie, familiar to the head botanic arcanist, despises Taro, but she needs her skills to escape. On the night they intend to enact their plan, the Thaumaturge drops dead, triggering the countdown to the Slaughter, a battle to the death for the crown between the four head arcanists and their familiars. Magically bound to the ritual, Taro and Nixie will die if they try to leave. Their only hope of freedom is to find four lost relics before the Slaughter begins and break an ancient curse on their city, but to succeed, they need the help of a blood arcanist and a stone arcanist. This darkly humorous fantasy trilogy opener, which will appeal to fans of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Room trilogy, starts strong with a fast pace driven by imminent life-or-death stakes, irresistibly self-destructive characters, and absorbing worldbuilding. An exploration of gender leans into a born-in-the-wrong-body narrative, and one of the few brown-skinned characters in the largely white-presenting cast has an arc in this volume that echoes an unfortunate trope. A cliffhanger ending creates high anticipation for the sequel.
