The world of Alchemised is a world at war — a world where the physical bodies of the dead can be reanimated and used as soldiers and weapons, a world of darkness, fear, and suspicion. It’s a world that captivated me completely.

Helena is a healer in Paladia, kept in a state of suspended animation until she wakes to learn her country has been defeated and she is now a captive. Stripped of her alchemy and her resonance, she’s sent to live in the home of one of Paladia’s most powerful enemies — the High Reeve, Kaine Ferron. Helena has no memory of the time before her capture, and the government is certain she’s hiding something important. Ferron is charged with finding out what.

Helena is afraid, too, of what her own mind might be protecting — and desperate to protect whatever remains of the Resistance she was once part of. As Ferron uses transference to search her memories, her physical health starts to break down: brain fevers, seizures, and finally a coma. While present-day Helena lies unconscious, the story pulls us back four years, into everything that led to her capture — and exactly what she’s been hiding.

I’ll be honest: for much of this book, at least through the first half of Part Two, I wasn’t fully sure what was going on. Eventually I just stopped trying to figure it out and let the story carry me. Once I did, I was completely pulled into SenLinYu’s world, and I didn’t want to leave it.

Devastatingly romantic. Epic. Sweeping and dramatic. Unforgettable, vivid, atmospheric, engrossing — Alchemised is all of it. I wanted to start the book all over again the second I finished the last page. I’d surface from reading into the real world with the strange feeling that my normal life was somehow lacking — and, at the same time, relief that the brutality of this fictional one wasn’t real. Somewhere in the second half, I went from desperate to know what happened next to dreading the turn of every page, because I didn’t want it to end. And because I knew there was so much more heartbreak still coming.