Review of Alchemised by SenLinYu
- The Bossy Bookworm

- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
This 1000-page fantasy novel is intense, brutal (significant trigger warnings are warranted), extremely dark, and not at all a universal recommendation. I struggled with and was also fascinated by the fact that in its original form, the story was Harry Potter fan fiction about Hermione and Draco. The structure and timeline is intriguing and illuminating.
This beast of a fantasy novel (it's 1040 pages) tracks a healer and alchemist suffering from significant memory gaps through three periods of time in her life.
When we meet Helena Marino in medias res, she is a prisoner. All of her fellow Resistance members have been captured or killed, and Helena is being treated cruelly largely by a staff of animated undead, directed by evil masterminds. On paper, Helena is a figure of little importance, but the obvious and deliberate tampering with her memories of the final months of the Resistance has led many to believe that she was an essential part of their fight--and that accessing her memories may be the key to understanding the entire Resistance system.
But Kaine Ferron, a dark necromancer who is attempting to release her memories, turns out to be a key part of Helena's past, and the book eventually begins to illuminate their complicated enemy/friend/destroyer/savior history.
The heart of this story was originally a work titled Manacled, and it was dark Harry Potter fan fiction about Hermione, who had an Order secret buried in her mind, and Draco, tasked by Voldemort with unearthing it. I didn't recall this when I first began the book, and I developed complex feelings about this premise and its implications.
This begins as a dark, dark novel. The setting is literally dark, and more importantly, Helena is imprisoned, confused, grieving those she lost, and reeling from the trauma of the stasis in which she was conscious but unmoving, unspeaking, and unacknowledged for many months. She continues to be imprisoned, fully reliant on her captors, and discussed and treated as an owned object. Her body and mind are used to her enemy's desired ends. Rape, forced entry into her brain, and practical starvation are all part of her life. This was brutal text to dive into, and reading about her mental and sexual violation for significant page time in SenLinYu's novel almost sent me packing.
But if you can steel yourself to continue, you might find the structure fascinating, as I did. The cruelty is real, and tough to take, but when, after the first grim, nerve-racking section ends, we skip back in time to read the origin story of Helena and Kaine, we find an unlikely love story built within a time of upheaval; trust overshadowing secrets and deception; and an opposites-attract scenario that serves as ballast for the novel. Context doesn't erase the horrors that we read about initially, but it softens some of the blows after the fact. An eventual second skip in time in the book follows chronologically from the first section, so it picks up the story and explores what happens to all surviving characters in the end.
Mental images of Hermione and Draco slipped in and out of my mind as I read the book, causing uncomfortable feelings that were at times difficult to sit with yet, admittedly, fascinating.
This is not a universal recommendation because of the shocking abuse (and the novel's significant length), but fantasy die-hards might want to test their mettle with this read.
I listened to Alchemised as a library audiobook (it was over 36 hours long), narrated by the fantastic Saskia Maarleveld, through Libby.

More Dark Fantasy Novels
Alchemised is SenLinYu's first published novel.
The intense darkness and necromancy of this novel reminded me at times of Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb series; Gideon the Ninth is the first book, followed by Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, and the future publication Alecto the Ninth.





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