I have to admit, I finished reading “Alchemised” three days ago and it’s taken me that long to try and work out how I was going to write about it on here, especially since I have some very mixed feelings about it. So, my first heads up is that my view on this book may be quite controversial for some people, so please don’t take it to heart, everyone has their own views and opinions that are different to others.

As always, spoilers ahead! Continue at your own risk! And I mean, some actual significant spoilers this time.

When this book came out, I was so excited to read it, especially since Kmart had the sprayed edge copy for a fantastic price! The blurb on the back completely hooked me: a world of alchemical magic, war, amnesia, potential morally grey love interest – totally my bag! Not to mention the art that was popping up on instagram, it looked amazing!

First of all, the world building was great! You’ve got a post-war world fuelled by traditional alchemical magic, which is something not a lot of authors write about and it completely caught my interest. It definitely gave off some “Babel” vibes by R.F. Kuang, which was a really good sign. Then you had the industrial additions such as motor cars, and stasis tubes to fill in the various parts of the story which I thought was well done. This brings me to the context of the world, there was a devastating war between different types of alchemists, and of course there was the motivation of eternal life and power for those to join the “dark side” and eventually the good guys lost. Their leaders were brutally executed and the resistance fighters were forced into a form of slavery and their powers nullified by cuffs that ran through their wrists.

Queue the main character, Helena Marino was a part of the resistance as a healer who had attended the alchemy tower for her studies before the war, she joined the resistance due to her friendship with their leader, plus she was a foreigner and didn’t really have anywhere else to go. We find out that something was done to her to force her to be conscious while in the stasis tube, then she woke up when she wasn’t suppose to and the scientists running the tubes realise that there was no record of her being put in stasis. In fact, she was recorded as being one of the dead int he final battle of the war. We also find out that Helena has no memory of the last fourteen months of the war, and that an Animancer had somehow managed to completely alter her mind and hide away her memories, which was believed to be completely impossible without the subject dying. It was believed that her hidden memories held some important information from the resistance, so she is sent by the high necromancer to the high reeve to have her memories extracted.

Time for the main male character, Kaine Ferron, who was also a student at the alchemy tower started the war by killing the resistance leader’s father (who was in charge of the city) and then became the high reeve, the necromancer’s right hand who did all of his dirty work. Helena is sent to him to have her mind ripped through and her memories recovered, which becomes and very painful and dangerous process, so dangerous that Ferron can only attempt it once a month to prevent Helena from dying. Their relationship is dark and abusive, however, you see the occasional act of tenderness from Ferron which is quickly stamped out by his rage and hate of Helena and the resistance.

Helena attempts to find ways to kill herself to protect whatever hidden information is in her mind, but Dr Stroud makes repeated visits to keep her healthy and repairing her body from the stasis tank. After a visit to the necromancer, Helena and Ferron discover that Helena was in fact the Animancer who had rewired her own brain to hide her memories after a bombing that should have killed her, a bombing that she had apparently set off. It turns out, that even though Helena wears the cuffs to prevent her using her magic, her power has been used internally since the bombing and has been consistently keeping her memories hidden even with the cuffs. Helena begins to be plagued with dreams that don’t make sense to her, the recent papers show that Stroud had developed a breeding program to ensure the birth of alchemists that the population had limited supply to due to the war. She plans to use the resistance survivors with alchemical abilities to repopulate the city with more alchemists, much to Helena’s horror especially when she finds out that the women were in fact being raped by ruling classes of the town. That part I found disturbing, I know that with war and often with post-war situations that rape is a factor that occurs, however considering that this world have developed stasis tubes to keep people alive, I would have thought that there would have been some form of artificial insemination that was developed.

Anyways, continuing on. After another visit from Stroud, Helena finds out Stroud had been reversing the sterilisation process that Helena was forced to do to join return to the Alchemy Tower. This was due to her power as a Vivimancer, someone who could alter the human mind and body to the point of necromancy, and a power that everyone at the time feared due to the high necromancer. Stroud had managed to make her fertile again without Helena or Ferron knowing, she claimed it was to ensure the birth of an animancer for the high necromancer’s use as a vessel. Helena was naturally horrified of being sent back to the city and being raped until she got pregnant, however, Stroud said that she must get pregnant by Ferron as he was also an animancer and that would ensure the baby’s alchemical power developing into animancy. Helena had to choose between being raped by multiple complete strangers, or just by Ferron, which to me is just a horrible decision to have to make. Helena chooses to stay and forces herself to endure the rape, while Ferron’s reactions before and after seem to indicate that he is not a willing participant and is as much forced into this as she is. I will say that SenLinYu’s presentation of the rape scenes were done very delicately and were very much a closed door style scene, which I personally very much appreciated.

Helena becomes pregnant, and because her body must grow a baby, she can no longer maintain the animancy that was hiding her memories. So, part 2 of the book was a complete recount of the lost fourteen months of the war which revolved around Ferron becoming a double agent for the resistance, Helena becoming his handler and attempting to seduce him to ensure his complete devotion to the resistance. Their relationship is as volatile as it is in the first part, however Ferron teaches her how to protect herself using her power and hand-to-hand combat, Helena teaches him how to use his dreadful power to heal rather than to kill and eventually they fall in love. Ferron knows the end of the war is near and the resistance is going to lose, he wants to get Helena to safety but she refuses to go without her pregnant friend. He agrees to get both of them out, but has to do it in two trips, he takes the friend first as per Helena’s request, and while he’s gone she develops a bomb to take out the enemies research lab in an attempt to severely wound their progress in the war. That gets us to Helena’s assumed death and being hidden in a stasis tube, Ferron tearing the city a part trying to find her while keeping her friend hidden and safe, then we are brought back to the present.

Helena has to face the fact that her lover raped her to get her pregnant, but she is surprisingly ok with that, Ferron is the one who is having difficulty dealing with it. I find these reactions extremely surprising and hard to believe, if anything, I would say that Helena would be even more distrustful of Ferron because of this but she isn’t. Anyways, in an attempt to protect Helena and the baby, Ferron helps Helena find a way to put an end to the high necromancer and free Ferron from his control. They only manage to do one of those things, which allows them to run away and hide with Helena’s friend who Ferron had been protecting for her. The rest of the book is spent with them hiding from the second outbreak of war, Helena having the baby and Ferron being pushed by Helena to love the baby as her father no matter how it was the baby came into the world. I was a little disappointed to see them hiding from the end of the war, I was hoping for a bit more of a come back for the two of them and taking down the necromancer but that didn’t happen. All in all, the book ended happily.

So, where do my mixed feelings come in?

I felt that the book was too long and lacked the necessary tension filled scenes to keep me engaged with it, which is unfortunate because the storyline was fantastic and the world building was amazing! Instead of the book being broken into three parts, it could have been three separate books which I think would have had better pacing and kept me totally hooked. While I liked Helena as a character, and I usually fall in love with the morally grey male character, I had some trouble really falling for Ferron, especially with the toxic way he treated Helena and communicated with her. That triggered a few things for me and made me like him less.

While this book had amazing potential and I wanted so badly to love it, I did struggle with the pacing and lack of tension in scenes of combat and the like. So, it was good for a first time publishing, but like all new authors there are some things that need strengthening. I really hope that SenLinYu keeps on writing, because they have one hell of an imagination!

Enjoy your reading!