The premise hooked me: the “pith” is the person and the body is just a chassis you drive. But the worldbuilding never earns it. Memory, language, and even personhood turn out to be editable or winnable in contests, yet the book also insists that a bad body will kill you, so the metaphor strains against its own plot. And nobody ever asks who makes these bodies. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War shows you the engineering and the branding, and Bennett’s biotech has a visible supply chain. Here, fully functional bodies just show up.
The “humdrum” label felt needlessly pejorative to me, especially once you learn magic is a learnable skill. The divide is access to training, not nature, which makes the contempt look like class snobbery in costume. The same goes for the “Edgar” brand for the cheap male chassis, which was a smart touch of shaming through vocabulary.
I wanted more from the gender angle. Ten years in a male body while living as a girl, and Nell being forced into one, gave the story real stakes. But the body market offers only two models, both built to a narrow, pale, lean beauty standard. For a world where you can choose your body, that’s an oddly limited menu, and the book doesn’t seem interested in questioning it.
The bigger picture reads as a totalitarian regime: it can erase names, wipe a people’s language until they drown themselves, and ration magic through one academy. All of that is more compelling than the surface plot. As for the blood and torture in a YA book, the darkness fits the themes, but it sometimes felt like escalation rather than insight.
Interesting ideas, thin foundations. I’d read the sequel only if it finally shows where the bodies come from and find out whether Nell decides she was happier in a "boy" body.
REVIEW: Queen of Faces by Petra Lord (2.5 stars)
