This is a story with vampires, but not about vampires, not really. Really, it’s a story about making your own path in world determined to push you onto a particular one, and about the necessity of help.

Violet Zennor’s life has been controlled by her father since the day her mother and brother died. When her father dies, Violet is excited to live her life as she pleases, only to find her efforts at independence thwarted by her father’s friends and mysterious enemies. She is left to make a choice in order to protect her remaining family, and undertakes a treacherous journey to a dark land where evil lurks.

I enjoyed this book mostly because of Violet herself. It was refreshing to have a female character who actually makes realistic plans, and is forced to change them not because she has accepted some mythic destiny, but because of mostly mundane concerns (everyone needs to eat, after all). Her reactions to things like prophecies are scathing, and she derides them as vague and unhelpful (again, love the realistic scepticism). Violet also is a portrayal of a survivor of abuse who refuses to let the worst thing that ever happened to her define her life. She lives beyond and despite it.

There are powerful women in this book, and a strong thread of “burn down the patriarchy”. If this novel were a film, it would pass the Bechdel test easily, as many of the critical interactions are between female characters, and the romance in the story is just a dusting of sugar on top. The magic system is not really explained, and that is ok, because our main character doesn’t have any magic herself. Magic is part of the lore, not the main focus of the story, and readers are left to deal with it as ordinary citizens of the book do: as something they accept without full understanding.

I would recommend this book to readers who liked The Lies of Locke Lamora for the practicality of the main character, to readers of The Sentinel Mage by Emily Gee, For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten and of The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan.

The Crimson Road is due for release 11th February 2025. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org