The Alchemists of Loom (The Loom Saga)

Rating: ⭑⭑⭑
TW: violence, body mutilation

The Alchemists of Loom has been on my tbr list for years at this point. Elise Kova has a special place in my heart thanks to her Air Awakens series which I still adore. I went into this book with high expectations and unfortunately, I wasn’t as pleased as I thought I would be with this novel. I really wanted to like it more. But there were quite a few things that made it fall short for me.

The novel is split into multiple POVs which is something I enjoy when each narrator is interesting. Some books that do this have me skipping chapters because I could care less about one of the characters. Alchemists wasn’t one that I found myself skipping through to get to more interesting parts. Arianna, Cvareh, Florence, and Leona all were important to the plot and gave insight into the events at play. In some chapters, Kova would reiterate an event and allow the reader into a different perspective than the one we originally had. I thought this was well-done style-wise.

I will not lie, I had a mad crush on Leona even though she was absolutely whipped to a male manipulator. She deserved better, RIP a sexy queen.

It opens up with our main character Arianna, or Ari, and the readers are immediately given the information that Ari is The White Wraith a notorious ass-kicking Fenthri criminal girlboss. While she does go on to prove this through actions, it’s continuously shoved down the reader’s throat time and time again even though we have a firm grip on the detail.

Ari has this odd relationship with her student, Florence, which feels like a mixture of teacher, mother, and homoeroticism. Florence is a strong character on her own and absolutely idolizes Arianna and in the beginning, I was absolutely sure she was in love with Ari from the number of times she thinks about how beautiful she is. So imagine my surprise when we meet the actual love-interest Cvareh.

Now, Cvareh is a nice guy and all, but being the so-called love-interest, he and Ari had zero romantic chemistry. Cvareh is a Dragon from Nova although Dragons are not actual Dragons, it’s just the name of their race that oppresses the Fenthri of Loom. He and Arianna begin as bitter enemies because of their racial divide (original ik) but slowly come to tolerate one another. But as I said before, there’s no chemistry that has me dreading the incoming romance.

I think my biggest problem in this novel was the secret-keeping from the readers just for a good plot twist. I understand from a writer’s standpoint about keeping things from your readers to really give a good wow factor, but I just don’t think it works here. There were multiple points in the book where it was just flat-out frustrating because I felt like I wasn’t being given the necessary information to understand Arianna’s actions and way of thinking. Honestly, I still don’t and it’s probably going to drag into book two. She makes multiple mentions of her dead lover but we never know what happened even though it’s clearly a large part of her character.

My last point has to do with the overall world-building. I think Kova does a good job with creating this fantasy world, but there were a lot of points where I was honestly confused about the timeline. I know she churns out books pretty quickly and one of my critiques of her work is that I wished she took more time in the editing process to smooth out issues like this.

Am I going to soldier on to the next book? Yes.

This book just wasn’t my favorite but I hope the next one improves.