Breakaway Books

Authored by SenLin Yu; Published September 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

Perhaps you have heard of Alchemised, the notoriously long, Book Tok-lauded dark fantasy novel guaranteed to tear your heart out and stomp all over it. Although it does have a certain addictive allure, I can’t say that it’s my favorite fantasy novel of the year so far. 

In Alchemised, healer Helena abruptly awakes in a stasis tank, to the horror of the governing authorities, who cannot find any records identifying her or how she came to be in suspended animation. She is eventually discovered to be a member of the Order of the Eternal Flame, the resistance movement working against the High Necromancer, and is ordered to be delivered to his second-in-command, the High Reeve, for brutal questioning. The problem? The past fourteen months have been erased from Helena’s memory, and the High Reeve must use his special alchemical talents to restore her mind to its original state, a feat never previously attempted. As Helena’s body wears down under the torture, her memories begin to come back, and the true horror of her situation comes to light.

If you are sensitive to violence in any form, you should not read this book. Full stop. From the very first page, Helena is brutalized emotionally, physically, spiritually… you name it, she, and later her partner Kaine, end up going through it. I couldn’t help but feel like it was over the top. It’s not that any one of the crimes committed against them is just too brutal to be realistic–I’m confident that each and every one of them could be committed in war, if we had the technology to do so. It’s the sheer density of the violence that occurs to these two people in the space of just a little over one year. It felt like far too much. (I also found the number of times the two of them attempted to sacrifice themselves for the other to be almost mind-numbing. The sacrifices certainly lost their gravity as the novel proceeded.) Of course, one of the thrusts of this novel is that war is an atrocity, but the author could have brought that message home with fewer words and a perhaps a slightly more subtle depiction of wartime violence.

All of that being said, many painful truths are contained in these pages, and they are worth considering and remembering. I especially appreciated how the novel depicted the weaknesses of the supposed heroes of the story, the Eternal Flame. The higher ups within the organization take advantage of Helena, overworking her and even selling her to the enemy. It brought to mind the way that ultimately, institutions look out for themselves far more than they look out for the individuals devoted to them, capitalizing on youth, talent, and enthusiasm to maximize their gains. The amount of blind devotion to this quasi-religious order feels disturbing, in spite of the fact that they are supposed to be the heroes. It was frustrating, but perhaps true to life, to watch the junior members of the order repeatedly fool themselves into believing that salvation is just around the corner, because that is what their superiors want them to believe and because it works to the advantage of the organization. I commend the author for such a nuanced, if depressing, depiction of the ways in which the “right” side can turn into something less than praiseworthy.

Alchemised has a sort of magnetism to it that will keep you reading through all thousand plus pages, but you may feel gross enough to need a shower afterward. It’s up to you whether that’s the kind of novel that you want to read next.