enne📚's status - Outside of a Dog

Tak! reviewed The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Antonia Hodgson: The Raven Scholar (2025, Hodder & Stoughton)

She might win the throne. She might destroy an empire. Either way, it begins with …

5 stars

I thought The Raven Scholar was refreshing and original.

It has some familiar tropes (the unappreciated, hypercompetent loner; multiple factions competing in a deadly tournament), but does a great job of avoiding cliches and subverting expectations.

There were a couple of places I was annoyed by the narration seeming to jump between character-limited and omniscient, but this is a minor quibble.

Despite apparently being the opener of a trilogy, it does a good job of telling a complete story and wrapping up the first phase of events.

enne📚 replied to Tak!'s status

@Tak@gush.taks.garden there's a lot of personal bias here, but I think "fantasy tournament" is high up on the list of tropes I am pre-exhausted by, and probably left me predisposed to not like this book as much

Tak! replied to enne📚's status

She might win the throne. She might destroy an empire. Either way, it begins with …

Content warning the raven scholar spoilers

@picklish I reread your review after I finished the book 🙂

I think I also would have been pretty disappointed if I had gone in expecting an Ana/Din esque fantasy whodunit

I feel like the author had a lot of chances to be lazy and avoided them - Yanara(?, fantasy authors please stop doing The Name Thing) wasn't the main character (or even Ruko), Yanara didn't turn out to not be dead, Neema or Cain didn't just win the tournament, Neema didn't miraculously turn out to be an amazing fighter despite no training, the gods didn't intervene and fix everything, there's probably more I forgot

tbh the whole thing with the emperor and the spell and the dragon girl is about 8 layers deeper than it needed to be (for this book), I guess/hope she has a plan

Barbarius replied to Tak!'s status

Content warning the raven scholar spoilers

@Tak@gush.taks.garden Now that you explicitly point out all the things the author didn't do, I realise that I appreciated them as well. @picklish@books.theunseen.city I also would argue that the whole "fantasy tournament" thing is less of a prominent element than it could, or I expected it to, have been. I think it's consistent background noise, but I was okay with that. Moreso because the aforementioned lazy outcome didn't eventuate.

Tak! replied to Barbarius's status

She might win the throne. She might destroy an empire. Either way, it begins with …

Content warning the raven scholar spoilers

@Barbarius @picklish I called out those specific ones because they're things I expected or half-expected while reading 😅