This is one of those books that grows on you. For me it was a bit of a rough start. The first few chapters were difficult to get through mostly because of all of the confusing, hard to pronounce names of the characters. The plot however draws you and and keeps you hooked. By chapter four I was invested and just had to find out what was going to happen. Following Ren through her schemes to become a member of House Traementis was nail biting at times. Carrick creates such an in depth world that you can almost feel and smell it. I loved the Venetian feel of the city of Nadezra. I also loved the loyalty Ren and her "siblings" Tess and Sedge show each other throughout the story. The twist at the end with the identity of the Room was one I wasn't expecting, I was almost certain it would have been a different character. I also found the glossaries at the end rather helpful. While I was hesitant to start this book initially because of the shear size of it, I'm extremely happy that I did. I can't wait to see what happens next in this trilogy.

An absolutely FABULOUS immersive dive into an alternate world of magic, political intrigue and skullduggery!
I WILL be purchasing a hardcover copy of this book upon release to keep in my permanent library, and am eagerly awaiting the second installment!

An amazing amount of thought and planning went into the world building here. This world has multiple moons, making for a complex layout of dates and times. It also has it's own system of magics. Both native and the inhabiting conquerers have differing religious and magical systems that are individually imaginative and rich. The setting Nadezrå is reminiscent of Venice. A city of islets, bridges and rigorous caste systems.

Our main character, Ren is a promising young thief in a band ran by a Fagginesque master Ondrakja. Who rules over her band of 'fingers' with a casual brutality. Ren does the unthinkable after Ondrakja punishes her by killing her blood brother Sedge because she feels Ren is too valuable a commodity to injure physically. Ren retaliates by poisoning Ondrakja and fleeing the city with her remaining blood sibling, Tess.

Jump forward five years, and Ren is back, masquerading as the Alta Renata with Tess as her devoted maid. Ren is determined to worm her way into the upper tiers of Nadezra's ruling elite and has set her eye on infiltrating the House Treamentis, which has fallen on hard times.

The story is a swirl of political intrigue, as Ren gets caught up in the maneuverings of the upper caste system. While also being unexpectedly insnared by her past as a Finger. Lovely characterizations, you really do care about the outcomes for Ren, Tess, House Treamentis and the other dizzying array of people. Sorta need a spreadsheet to keep everyone straight. Thankfully there is one in the back of the book which I didn't discover til I had finished it! :D

Highest, HIGHEST recommendation!!!

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC for my unbiased review.

Before you pick this book up, you should know that this is a slow book with a large cast. Its main focus is on characters, politics, scheming and a bit of a mystery at its center. It includes a lot of descriptions of clothing, which I normally don't care about, but it was written in a way that added a lot to world building and I found myself enjoying it.

This is the first book I finished in 2021 and honestly, I couldn't have started it with a better book. The characters are great. The world building was very immersive. I don't think there was a single thing I disliked about this book. The last 20%-30% was a wild ride and I need book 2. Now.

Big thank you to Orbit for the advanced reading copy, I was very excited to receive it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

5/5 glowing stars!

First of all, what a completely perfect book to start off 2021! There is no better way to start a year than a perfect rating! This was amazing. Imagine Six of Crows, but everyone's grown up, there's cons instead of heists, and everything is much, much darker. Well, I guess it doesn't sound as much like Six of Crows now, but it has the same vibe and excellence!

Ren is a con artist who has come to the city of opportunity with one goal: to con a noble family to secure her fortune and her sister's future. She never expected to actually become attached to the family, or the people around her. And she definitely didn't expect corrupt magic, the poisonous feuds of its aristocrats, and the shadowy dangers of its impoverished underbelly to become tangled -- with Ren at their heart.

A big make or break in a book is the characters. Are they interesting? Are they unique? Do they have any kind of character arc? I was on the lookout for all of those characteristics, and I'm happy to report that all of them were checked off!

What I especially loved was that we got some gray area characters! Does doing the wrong thing for the right reason make it okay? What about doing the right thing for the wrong reason? We got that with basically our entire cast of characters. Our main character is literally a con artist! She walks that thin line and is an amazing MC. I have trouble finding a main character that I actually enjoy reading, so I'm glad I found one in her. My favorite character, Vargo, is an enterprising crime lord. What could possibly be cooler? He's also a bit of a grown-up, cutthroat Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows (yeah I know, sorry for all the SoC references but this book reminds me so much of it) who, if you know me at all, you'll know I LOVE him, just as I LOVE Vargo! Seriously, I can't wait for more in book two.

The Mask of Mirrors brought in a super diverse cast! Not only in personality (though thank goodness it's diverse there too) but in every aspect! We got to see all different kinds of LGBTQ+ representation as well as an interesting one I haven't ever seen written about. Vargo, the best character in the book (in my humble opinion), has nosophobia. Nosophobia is the fear of contracting an illness or developing a disease. Vargo is a normally unshakable person who takes great pride in his dignity. So to see him gone completely limp from fear, so much so that he had to be carried around another character's neck like a scarf, really just goes to show how much something like that can level your world, no matter how strong or powerful you are.

The worldbuilding in this novel was so rich and consuming that it didn't feel at all like anything I've read! I know I keep saying that this book is unlike anything I've read and then I call it Six of Crows or something, but it really has so many unique elements that I just love. I was a little confused at the beginning with all the terms, but I, the idiot, didn't notice the glossary or character index at the end until I was an embarrassing amount of the way through the book (the end). I'm so glad it was included! When reading political high fantasy books, I get the names and terms mixed up too often.

The Mask of Mirrors was written by M.A. Carrick, which is the pen name for two authors working together. When I read a book written by multiple authors, it's really a no go for me if I can tell the writing apart. But these two writers fit seamlessly, so much so that I would never have guessed there were two of them if I didn't read the author blurb!

I've been looking at the reviews on Goodreads for a while now, trying to find why anyone could have rated it below five stars, and the complaint I see most is the pacing. Yes, the pacing can be a little slow at times. The book is nearly 700 pages! Do you expect it to zoom along the entire time? I actually enjoyed the slower pacing when it cropped up, though the pacing was pretty good for the most part, as evidenced by the fact that I didn't even think about it until I saw the reviews.

I absolutely loved this book! It blew away all my expectations. I'm so grateful I got to read a copy, and I would 100% recommend it! I positively can't wait for the second book to be released, and I wonder what else these authors could create!

A fantastic introduction to a complex world full of political rivalries, intrigue, and an ambitious con, The Mask of Mirrors is the first book in the can't miss new series The Rook and The Rose.
Nadezra "The City of Dreams", if full of deception, secrets, and mystery. Each resident wears multiple faces. From the crime lord turned legitimate business man, to the mysterious disguised man defending the common folk from the corruption of the city's elite. In The Mask of Mirror's no one is exactly what they seem.

I really wanted to like this book. I liked Marie Brennan's Lady Trent books, and I hoped I would enjoy this book like I enjoyed those. However, this was a case where the authors' vision and the reader's expectations didn't match up. There were aspects of the novel that I enjoyed. The Rook was intriguing, and I kept reading to find out who he was. I worried about the street children who couldn't sleep, and I hoped that a cure would be found for them. I appreciated the depth of the characters and their variety--in terms of age, gender identify, sexuality, and ethnic background. The setting was rich and nuanced, and there seems to be plenty of space for the series (trilogy?) to explore many aspects of the world. However, these were secondary points, which meant I found the subplots and characters more interesting than the main plot. I had trouble sympathizing with the main character, con artist Ren, who was running a scheme to ingratiate herself into a noble house, and her schemes meant that I kept meeting new people in new places with new terms to remember. I could not keep track of all of the many noble houses and roles. I also just could not get excited about a plot that hinged on earning a trading charter. That said, the book ended with several revelations that promise new fireworks in the sequel, and I'm interested to see where the authors take Ren next.

i received an arc from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

this book is one that had me really bored in part 1 and super hooked for parts 2-4. it is a “political high fantasy” that is HEAVY on the politics, so be prepared for a lot of names, titles, and places to be thrown at you right from the get go. i struggled a lot in part 1 (hence why i was bored), but figured out by part 2 that there are only a few characters that actually mattered and the other names could be fluffed over. is this the best way to read adult high fantasy? probably not. but my brain could not handle all of the proper nouns on the page - so i decided to give it a break.

parts 2-4 are addicting. a mystery starts to form, and there are perhaps some romantic inklings?

two things i loved:
- casual acceptance of lgbtq+ people: the word “spouse” is used instead of “husband” or “wife” when the gender of the spouse isn’t known. similarly, there is a trans side character mentioned without any trace of transphobia.
- discussions of privilege: i love a good discussion of race and class. this book, while a bit heavy-handed on some of the commentary, did a good job of showing how stratified society is.

things i did not like:
- YIKES, INCEST? leato and renata’s “chemistry” was super weird. i know they’re not technically cousins because ren is a con woman, but leato doesn’t know that!
- pacing: this book was unnecessarily drawn out. whole scenes could have been easily deleted. i just felt my mind wandering during a few sections.

and the reveal of the rook? i wasn’t surprised - this person was my first guess. but the authors did a good job of giving some red herrings that brought me off course.

anyways, all in all, this is a pretty solid adult fantasy. i don’t really foresee myself continuing with the series, but as my first ever arc, it was a good start!

——

currently reading review

i requested this arc because (somehow) the synopsis gave me adult six of crows vibes? i think it was “a rich and dazzling fantasy adventure in which a con artist, a vigilante, and a crime lord must unite to save their city” that got me.

honestly, i don’t know what i was thinking when requested it, but i’m glad i did get the arc, because this book is pretty good.

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51340378-the-mask-of-mirrors" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Mask of Mirrors (Rook & Rose, #1)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1590151669l/51340378._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51340378-the-mask-of-mirrors">The Mask of Mirrors</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19457338.M_A_Carrick">M.A. Carrick</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3622225760">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
I consider myself very lucky to have received an ARC of this book from NetGalley by way of the World Fantasy Convention virtual book bag. Not only did I get to read this fabulous book that was completely off my radar, but now I have a NetGalley account to get more books in advance.<br /><br />This book caught my attention even before I learned that M.A. Carrick is a pen name with Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms on the other side. I am not familiar with Helms, but have enjoyed some of Brennan's work and was happy to read more. And there's a lot to love about this book!<br /><br />I'm a sucker for fantasy Venice, and this one delivered both the familiar and the unfamiliar. The language is distinct (not just fantasy-bastardized Italian); while the city is a canal city, it's not just Venice was a mask and a hat on; and the story explores colonialism and class conflict, not merchants versus monarch neighbors.<br /><br />Once I learned that Marie Brennan was half of this writing duo, I knew I was in for some rich world building, both micro (the clothing details!) and macro (the geopolitical history!). It took me a while to get the hang of it (mostly the geopolitical history), because my hand was not held very much, but I eventually sorted out the different people groups, where they came from, what they called themselves, what they called each other, and why the city is contentiously shared. I appreciate that the focus of the story was continually on the characters, social interactions, and the intrigues of the plot, and not on massive exposition dumps that might have cleared up the history but at the expense of boring me and making me put the book down. <br /><br />The political intrigue is built around actual local politics, not a monarch’s court, a war, high-society family feuding, or a disruptive incident like an election or new head of a powerful family. All of those can produce wonderful and thrilling stories, but I have been looking for something different, and I found it here. Rather then starting with a disruption and following characters who try to leverage it to attain their goals, this plot is the unfolding of the disruption amidst everyone’s schemes and agendas. Also, we follow characters representing several sectors of society’s lowest tiers, rather than the highest. None of our main characters just happens to know someone in the nobility or the slums in order to get that tier on the page; they all work hard for their interactions.<br /><br />Beware if you're easily lost or put off by large casts of characters! I really like this in a story, even when I lose track of people and forget who they are. It was a little tough because different characters referred to each other by different forms of their names, and there were a few secondary characters that became muddled for me, especially because I had to take a month-long break in the middle of reading this book. However, everyone was distinct enough that I recalled who they were and how they fit into the story as the scenes progressed, so I was never lost for long. <br /><br />Tl;dr: this book made me happy. It's stuffed full of my big-fat-fantasy-novel joys. It didn't drag like (I quite honestly have come to expect from) a 600+ page book, it wasn't two or three books smashed into one, or a book that didn't know when to stop and so ended on a cliffhanger/left some huge part of the plot unresolved to shortcut into the next book. The pacing was tight. The story wrapped up, justice was served, the characters advanced in their goals. In doing so the positions and relationships between the main characters shift so that new tensions emerge that will drive the interpersonal aspects of whatever the next plot is, and I am really looking forward to it.
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20325359-e-a">View all my reviews</a>

The Mask of Mirrors is a complex story about a con artist who infiltrates a wealthy family. I loved the atmosphere and the characters. I did find it difficult to keep up with who was who since there are so many characters. I am sure fantasy loves will love this book.

This book was great right from the start. I loved it. The characters in this book are fantastic. The magic is complex. There are so many plot twists that I was wishing it was even longer than 672 pages.

The story follows Ren, orphan/con artist. Her latest and most ambitious con is to become Alta Renata and join the ranks of the rich and elite. She has plans to con her way into the wealthy Traementis family and let them support her. It will be hard to keep up her ruse with all the dark magic popping up in the city. Not to mention her past dogging her every step.

Great start to a new series. I can't wait for the next one.

This book is AMAZING. I am so impressed at the level of detail in the world buikding, amazing character construction, and brilliant pacing of this book. I seriously cannot say enough good things and it was a delight to read. I cannot wait for book two!

Really solid fantasy. The characters are fantastic. Lots of secrets and complexities. The story was slow in spots but the descriptions and plot are so worth it. I really enjoyed the main character and her story. This story definitely shows how people hide behind masks even if you can't see them. I will definitely read more by this author.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC! Disclaimer: I didn't want to give this book a rating, because I didn't get through much of it, and I don't feel like a rating based on a fraction of the book is necessarily fair. I stopped reading at about 10%. While the idea of the story very much intrigued me, I didn't find the characters interesting enough to sit through the slow plot development and world-building. I usually love books with extensive world-building, but it has to be balanced out with other things that keep my interest in the meantime, and this story just didn't have that. Unfortunately, the book is too lengthy for me to invest however much time it might take for me to really get into it. It just wasn't for me.

Omg this book was so good!! It took me a while to read it and get through those 672 pages but I'm not mad about it because I got even more attached to these characters and the plot.

The Mask of Mirrors follows Ren, a con-artist who murdered the leader of her knot after she killed Ren's brother. With her sister Tess, Ren runs away to try another job, one that could let her be part of the nobility if she succeeds and be able to enjoy the benefits of such a position. But for that, she'll have to be really smart and put on the mask of Renata, a distant relation trying to reconnect with her family. She was never meant to care for Leato, Guina or their mother but eventually, she did and so did I. We also have an evil house that needs to be stopped and the mystery of a cloaked man "The Rook" to figure out.

Overall, this was a very interesting (even if can be slow at times) and so worth the read. I cried for some characters and the ending left me shocked (view spoiler). It's not often that authors/books manage to fool me like that especially in Fantasy instead of Thrillers, but wow, I loved everything about it and I cannot wait for book two!!

(Thank you for letting me read and review an ARC via Netgalley)

The Mask of Mirrors, by M.A. Carrick (Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms) is a novel of complex plot and rich characterization that does just what you want a first novel in a series to do: arrive at a strong resolution while also leaving you eager to see what happens next. As such, despite a few issues, it’s an easy recommendation as a great way to start off your fantasy reading for 2021.

The setting is the city of Nadezra — “City of Drams” — ruled over by an occupying, mostly corrupt, noble elite whose ancestors conquered the surrounding land, then were driven out of all but the city, which in the peace treaty became “shared”, in the sense that the conquerors (the Liganti) rule and the natives (the Vraszenians) get access to their holy sites. The story has one truly main character — Ren — and a number of major other characters (too significant to be labeled “side” characters):

Ren: a young woman, former child of the streets, who with her blood-sister Tess
is running a long con to insinuate herself into one of the city’s powerful (or once-powerful to be more accurate) families by impersonating an estranged “niece” they’ve never met or heard of

House Traementis: A somewhat fallen House desperately trying to stave off utter collapse. Currently, the House consists of a sternly strong matriarch (Donnaia), her charmingly wastrel son Leato, and her young teen daughter Giuna, whom both Leato and Donnaia have tried to protect from the harsher realities of their situation and the larger political world

Grey Serrado: Captain of the Vigil, the Nadezra police force, and best friend of Leato Traementi. As a native Vraszenians working for the hated Liganti, Serrado is stuck between two worlds, a fraught position recently made worse by the recent killing of his brother

Derossi Vargo: an up-and-coming crime lord who, like Al Pacino in the Godfather films, is seeking to go “legit” by joining the nobility

The Rook: sort of a nationalistic Batman. For 200 years, the hooded swordsman has been protecting the Vraszenians and taking on the Liganti, though most assume they are not the same person over the two centuries, but a role handed down old Rook to new Rook.

Lesser albeit important characters include the head of a rival House to Traementis and his male heir, Varga’s bodyguard Sedge, a young street child, and an astrologer.

Because this is a mix of con games (multiple ones), heists, secret identities, revenge plots, murder mysteries, political intrigue, magical enigmas, and schemes within schemes within schemes, I’m not going to into a detailed plot summary. I’ll just note a few general aspects.


One is that it’s a dense, attention-requiring plot involving a lot of characters, a lot of names (not just the main characters), and as noted, a lot of schemes. The plot, in other words, is full of plotting. This probably isn’t, therefore, a novel to read while binging Schitt’s Creek. I enjoyed the complexity of the story, though at times I think we’re given more information than we need that unnecessarily make it more complicated. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t need all the clothing descriptions, but given how important appearance is in this society I’ll somewhat grudgingly cede its relevance (though appearance is important in any noble society and not all give us the same level of painstaking detail—again, MMV)

The authors do an excellent job of creating tension/suspense in a variety of ways and settings, whether via a street riot, a chase scene, an abduction, a duel, or through more “mannered” but no less vicious scenes that takes place in a more domestic setting: a jewelry store, a wedding party, the parlor or study of one of the houses.

The identity of the Rook is a big question throughout, which I think is problematic. Secret identities work in the real world because the choices of who lies underneath the identity are nearly endless. Batman could be any of millions living in Gotham. But in a novel, we have basically two options: a relatively major character or somebody we haven’t or barely met. The latter is a bit of a cheat (sort of like a mystery writer introducing the murderer for the first time on the last page), so it’s almost always going to be the former. And therein lies the problem because now, rather than potentially being millions, or even dozens, we’re down to a literal handful. Which forces the author into playing all sorts of games while also making the characters at least a little oblivious. For instance, all the possibilities have to either be coincidentally the exact same height and body type or the author has to arbitrarily withhold that information and pretend the characters never notice those qualities, even as they’re hyper-alert to other details, such as the piping on a jacket or a curl of hair. And even with these games, because the options are so few, the reader still has a good chance of figuring it out. Now, admittedly how one reacts to this is somewhat dependent on one’s personality. Personally, I find it frustrating in the, “Look, I know who it is, you should know I know who it is by now, so can we drop the whole ‘who is it, who is it’ routine for the next few hundred pages?” Your mileage may vary.

Finally, with regard to plot, the novel does a nice job of bringing most of the main questions and conflicts to resolutions, while leaving some up in the air and also opening up a number of other intriguing concerns and mysteries. Which, as noted in the intro above, is exactly what you want a first book to do.

As for characters, The Mask of Mirrors is a perfect example of taking familiar character types and imbuing them with a sense of unique personality and rich detail such that they feel like actual people rather than the types they are. Ren, Vargo, Serrado, etc. are all complex, multi-faceted characters, within their own selves and also because they are often forced into playing a role, either because they’re literally acting (as with Ren and Tess’ con) or because they need to present different faces in different situations/company, much as well do on a regular basis. Varga, for instance, has one face for his street gang and another for when he moves in more noble company, while Serrado has a form (and content) of speech amongst his Liganti comrades on the Vigil and another when he interacts with his own people. These sort of “code-switching” scenes are often some of the most revealing and also most tense, particularly when the stress of the scene makes it more likely someone might slip, such as how Ren might drop into her street slang if faced with a triggering situation. I also enjoyed just how “gray” many of the characters are, as well as how that greyness, combined with never being quite sure just how transactional the relationships are, means one is never always fully confident where they (the reader) stands with them or how they stand (or will stand) to one another once they get new information and/or new motivations or opportunities.

The world-building is solidly constructed. Thanks to Ren’s con game of playing a cousin from a different land (her “mother” had left Nadezra years ago and had no contact since), the authors get to play the “You know, Bob . . . “ card frequently because those doing the explaining don’t realize Bob actually does know. It’s a clever way of straightforwardly info-dumping details of history, culture, city layout, religion, and magical systems (patterning: a sort of Tarot card power, inscribing—channeling energy through precisely drawn figures, and imbuing—giving certain qualities to objects) without it feeling clumsy. That said, beyond the magic and politics (and clothing), I wouldn’t call it a deeply detailed world.


The Mask of Mirrors is a long book, and now and then it may feel its length, but I’m glad the authors chose to take their time in telling this tale, as it allowed for the slow revelation of character as well as the slow maturation (or shifting) of relationships. I’d expect some would argue for it losing one or two hundred pages, but I think it earned its length. The authors have woven a rich tapestry of plot and character, and I’m hoping not to have to wait too long to see the rest of it unfold.

Per the publisher's email request to not post reviews until two weeks before the publication date, this review will not be posted on my blog, Goodreads, or linked on my Twitter or Instagram until Friday, January 8th, 2021.

Thank you Orbit and Netgalley for granting me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This is one of those books where you have to really be patient in order to begin to get a sense of the method to the madness. I think it’s important to go into this book knowing that you might be a bit overwhelmed with the intensity of the worldbuilding (if you’ve read the A Song of Ice and Fire/ Game of Thrones series you will know what to expect). If you can get past that, though, you’re in for a pretty intriguing story.

Aside from the prologue, you are thrown into the story right when Ren is starting her con as Renata in order to try and worm her way onto a noble family’s register. So, almost immediately you are met with chess-game-esque conversations and court politics that go hand-in-hand with an extreme amount of world-building. I’m the type of reader that typically enjoys court politics and detailed world-building in fantasy novels, however, this ended up being too convoluted for me. There are several different races that each have their own historical and cultural backgrounds that are discussed throughout the book, as the city has it’s own rather violent history between warring groups of people, and this ends up adding a layer of tension into the plot. Then there are three main characters that you follow (with an occasional side-character’s POV popping up): Renata trying to con her way into the noble family, Grey, the constable captain that spends his spare time looking into the murder of his brother, and Vargo, the crime-lord trying to expand his control. I love intricate plots where there are several working layers and pieces happening at the same time, but there’s a lot of unknown and ambiguity for too much of the story that it just became confusing. I also don’t think that the worldbuilding in general would have been as overwhelming if there wasn’t such an avalanche of terminology that went with the world that Carrick created, as things like the days of the week or names of the months became cumbersome and distracting from the story itself.

The first half of the book is heavily involved in political maneuvering, with the magic of the world peeking out every now and again, but at roughly the halfway point these two things flip in prominence, and that’s when the story really took off for me. I love the magic system. Carrick took ideas of tarot, astrology, and dreamscapes and reinvented them to fit the world. There’s also another aspect of the magic system that involves something similar to drawing the alchemy symbols in the anime/manga Fullmetal Alchemist. Carrick did a great job of associating each type of magic with a different culture of people that reside in the city of Nadezra, and I do think that this enriched several aspects of the book, including the disconnect/animosity between the two main groups of people. This is also the point in the story where the different layers and moving parts start to feel more defined, and the secrets and questions, while often still unanswered, come into focus more. This is what really hooked me.

Character-wise, I think Carrick did okay. I actually ended up enjoying Vargo and Grey more than Renata, but I do think that Renata is a good character. Vargo was the most interesting to me, because his different layers felt more fleshed out. While Renata certainly had different layers, I felt like there was a slight disconnect between her and the reader. I also really appreciated how Carrick wrote the relationships between different characters, especially since there were moments where I feel like it’s common for authors to create unnecessary conflict as filler for the plot, but Carrick didn’t fall into that. All of the conflicts and the way that they were or were not resolved felt realistic and logical to me.

Aside from a bumpy beginning, I did find myself enjoying this book. Carrick doesn’t leave us on a cliffhanger, but they definitely left me curious with newly-formed questions. Be patient with the worldbuilding, because the magic and plot development make this a book that I think people are going to enjoy, and I have very high hopes for how the rest of this series will play out.

I loved reading Mask of Mirrors. Full stop.

The characters are complex and three dimensional with secrets they reveal slowly both to the reader and to each other. The magic system was fascinating and I devoured every scrap of information we were given, tagging pages so I could go back and try to see how it could be used to solve problems that came up later. This book is a guaranteed purchase for me.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me an eARC of this book in return for a fair and honest review.

This book has absolutely everything I could ask for in a fantasy! It is about a girl named Renata (Ren) Viraudax who is trying to con her way into one of the noble families of Nadezra, but from the very first moment, things do not go according to plan.

There is the long con, there is scheming and manipulating, there are betrayals and friendships that could never be broken, there are political shenanigans. The magic systems (yes, systems!) are beautiful and also integral to the plot and the world building because Nadezra is a conquered land. We have the conquered people who pull influence from Romani culture and their magic system is based on a form of tarot. Then we have the conquering people who have a magic system that reminds me of alchemy if you did it with Gallifreyan runes and threw in astrology. In addition, there is also a revolution plot and a masked vigilante known as the Rook.

I will say if you are newer to fantasy, or you prefer explanations, you might be disappointed or frustrated with this book because it throws you in and you just have to roll with it and hope for an explanation later. The magic systems are used frequently and only somewhat explained. Lots of characters are introduced and it may be difficult to keep them and their alliances straight (Which this book is not btw, LGBT characters are accepted as part of the culture).

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am dismayed that I must wait so long for the sequel.

Thank you to Orbit and NetGalley for the advanced copy.

Mask of Mirrors ultimately was not for me. I couldn’t make sense of the worldbuilding due to the multiple POVs and converging plot lines throughout, although I can appreciate how intricate said worldbuilding was.

I may give the book another chance once I’m able to purchase a physical copy!

Unfortunately I could not finish this book. This is really a me issue, but I dislike the fact that I've spent a week on this book and am 30% in and feel nothing for the characters or the plot or anything. The worldbuilding is cool because it's very detailed and clearly thought out. I might have been invested more in the characters had I finished the book, but I can't bring myself to keep reading. At this rate, it would take me a full month to read the book, and I wasn't sure if I would like enough to spend that much time on it.

I was intrigued by the whole con Ren is pulling off, but there's obviously a plot involving the magic that's supposed to come in later, so I don't understand why it isn't intertwined with the con plot line now. Also, I know I only read a third of it, but the book tries to juggle too many plot lines at once. There are multiple points-of-view, which wasn't really an issue except for the fact that it's still so heavy on Ren's PoV. I mean, yes, she's the protagonist, but I feel like bringing in whole other plot lines for two to three pages and then simply not returning to them for another hundred pages made it feel too unbalanced.

Again, these are my own opinions. I might have liked the book more if I kept reading. (A few reviews have said that the ending is really good; I just couldn't bring myself to read anymore.)