Author of Ihale and Ghost Punch

A story usually sticks in my mind while I’m away from it for one of two reasons:

Something about it is so astronomically bizarre and puzzling that I can’t help trying to put it in order and figure out why it bothers me, or

It is such a delight that I can’t hardly bear to be apart from its atmosphere, and I spend my time recreating its ambiance in my mind until I can dive back into it.

Mostly, I hover at the edge of these, not quite enthralled in either direction, and perfectly content to put a book down and go about my day without giving it another thought until reading time comes back around. The Crystal Blight fizzes with personality and exudes an aura of damp, old forest and stone, crackling magic, and the translucent ghosts of gods and myths. Alongside its bright cast of queer characters—trans, aro, ace, bi, lesbian, all your favorites are there—I found it catching my imagination constantly while away.

This next installment in the Ihale series picks up in the midst of powerful magic—that unique mix of earth and green and decay and life, tossed together with the world’s script magic. After all, this is a story of unsettled magics. I continue to be delighted in the way script is described. Its very name and shape recall writing and its form a physical thing to be spun together, snatched, shattered in a very tangible way. Magic is so often an intangible thing in stories—a floating, ethereal thing. Somehow Lawrence’s word choice gives script a weight in the world, a fascinating presence of its own.

Alongside the very mechanical, logical script is the wild, natural magic of the forest god and the world itself. With The Crystal Blight, the terrible events of the first two books solidify—quite literally, as crystal infests the city—and we come to see that history as it is written, remembered, and celebrated is not always the whole truth. History is set to repeat itself if Heln, Bel, Rhyss and the others aren’t careful.

I love how much The Crystal Blight plays with the idea that all is not as it seems: the Heroes of history are more complicated than they are remembered; they are more present than anyone believes; and their stories are far from over. The Crystal Blight makes it clear that we, as readers, are not walking into the beginning of the story as it may have seemed in The Rising Stones. This is the smack-dab middle of it. This is not a new chapter in an old world. This is the continuation of old chapters already in motion. There’s something delightful in that sense of age.

And yet, alongside the moss and the old trees, the practical warming scripts in the seams of shirts and the cracked stone flowering beneath ancient hooves, the magic-fueled prosthetics and shapeshifters straight from legend, there is also levity and light.

Lawrence’s writing shines in the quick banter between siblings and friends, in sharply shot quips from characters confident in who they are. Perhaps the only thing to tarnish this is the occasional ambiguous pronouns in descriptions. With our ensemble of returning and new characters, it can be easy to get lost in the he’s and she’s and they’s of a scene moving quickly, and sometimes it feels like Lawrence is reluctant to use names at these times. An unspoken rule in the English language is that a pronoun on its own usually refers to the last named person who uses those pronouns: Rhyss grabbed her dagger—where “her” is Rhyss. Lawrence doesn’t always follow this, and in scenes where there are multiple characters with the same pronouns, it can take a moment to suss out which “he” is being referred to.