People who enjoy modern fantasy and secret societies would likely enjoy this book. I found the world to be interesting, but didn’t really understand some of the characters reactions. Ember was great though. Loved Ember.

I have complicated feelings about this book. It's really well written. Pacing is nice. The story is great. You can see that the author tried to research the trans experience (from what I'm told the author is cis). The talk about hrt and dysphoria are really good. I love the effort. I also really love the trans mc. And it's also consistently trying to be affirming that trans women are women. But it also occasionally misses the boat to the point of unintentional micro aggression, has a random fatphobic remark, and doesn't really explain the magic system/world building. And it uses violent transhate as a plot device and I'm really exhausted by that. Cis people do that as often as cis men use rape as a plot device. As if trans people can't exist outside of trauma. Really good book and I truly applaud the effort, but not necessarily a safe read if you're trans. 3 stars.

Making Ash of Errors by Linda Robertson Reinhardt

After an audition at bar goes wrong in surprising and violent ways, Krissy and Demo are thrown together in a fight against secret magic societies that will change everything they’ve come to know about themselves.

This sounds like a cheesy way to describe this book, and I’m terribly sorry. This book is hard to give a summary on because there’s so much worldbuilding and so many characters and the plot is wild.

All in all, as a whole, I enjoyed this book. The book moves at a good pace and the plot takes a number of twists and turns. It is extremely entertaining. For most of this book, I had no idea where this story was going. Like, it’s that kind of book.

My problem with this book lies in the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding feels very erratic and I never got a good grasp of the rules. There’s elementals that give people powers but there’s also people with innate powers and sometimes you can teach someone magic. This book wanted to do too many different things, and ends up doing some of them okay, and everything else just suffers for being too crowded.

So yeah, if you want a fun, urban fantasy story about two people (maybe more? It depends on how you count, anyways) trying to escape the clutches of shadowy forces and you’re willing to accept a lot of worldbuilding at face value, this is pretty good.

Thanks to NetGalley and Igni House Publishing for a copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

A NOTE: this book needs content warnings and trigger warnings.

DNF around 30%
I requested this arc as I'm interested in reading more works with trans characters, but where this book did feature a trans character, it wasn't what I thought it would be.
I'm glad the writer added an acknowledgement upfront, where she thanked her editor for helping her and correcting her. But she's still cis. And it shows. In my opinion is this not a true reflection of a trans experience. I also wouldn't be able to write about Krissy's experience, as my life is way different than hers, and neither is the writer.
Instead, we are given the occasional facts. It shows that the author has done the research, but telling the technicalities doesn't make me connect with a character. I don't want to be told that she still has a slight Adam's apple, tucks or takes her HRT. I want to know what her life is like. In fiction, it's rarely mentioned that a character gets their period or takes birth control, as they are just everyday things and they don't define a person. If one wants to write a story featuring a trans character, write about them being a person and the part that does reflect you. Because there are so many parts of being human, and one doesn't have to sum up all the parts of being trans to tell their story.

The story also contains POVs from other characters. In the beginning, I struggled with identifying which ones would be important, and as I continued reading, I found myself skipping certain POVs as I found myself not caring about those stories.
After a while, I started skimming most of the book, and I figured I better save myself the effort and stop reading the book altogether.


Thank you NetGalley and Igni House Publishing for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.