#ma carrick

The Face of Glass

tagged by @e-b-reads and @bigcats-birds-and-books to post the next nine books I want to read, but I don't think that far ahead so here are the nine books left on my 25 in 2025 list instead :3

I received a free copy from Orbit Books via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date July 14th, 2026.

I thought author team MA Carrick's previous series (starting with A Mask of Mirrors) was interesting but not quite to my taste, so I was willing to give them another shot with this book in a new universe. In The Eye of Leviathan, sixteenth century Spain has expanded from the conquest of the New World to pillaging Faerie using their secret portal. A faerie plots to substitute themself with their friend's unwanted daughter in order to topple Spain's empire, but finds that the conquistadors may be more difficult to defeat than they thought...

The book's narrative is split into two POVs, one for the child sent to fairyland and one for the changeling left behind to replace her. Overall, it's a very worldbuilding-forward story, and the authors have an excellent touch with the details. The central premise is a Spain that managed to not only murder their way through the New World, but also pillage the lands of Faerie—baptizing their people into mortal slaves, looting magic items, and binding Faerie islands to the map. It's brutally well drawn, and it's obvious the authors did their research into the historical side of things. The Inquisition is genuinely chilling but not sketched with too heavy a hand, and the bits about Estevan in university were particularly good. I didn't know there was a bullfighting part to your thesis defense... Still, I did regret the lack of detail on the course of alternate history in the New World itself. There's references to the same debates over the rights of indigenous people there, but both Estevan and the authors' attention is firmly fixed elsewhere.

However, while the worldbuilding was well done, the plot and characters were a bit more standard fantasy tome for my taste. The plot is straightforward—Estevan plots to infiltrate the Spanish portal administration council and the girl trapped in Faerie tries to escape. Especially for a big doorstopper of a novel, my taste runs to twistier books. On the character side, I would have preferred for Estevan's point of view to be a bit more inhuman. He feels exactly like the girl's perspective—but perhaps the point is that the inhabitants of Faerie are just as human as their conquerors, who claim that they are soulless. I also appreciated that the authors took religion seriously as a major force in the period. It's a nice touch that the girl's lifelong fear from being told she'll dissolve into nothing when she dies is a major contributor to her initial attraction to the conquistadors' side.

Dear Vargo, please make sophisticated-yet-thuggish love to me on this pile of lovingly described period dresses. Ren, please keep using your complete inability to ever deal straight with anyone, ever, for the side of Good somehow (???). Grey, ACAB but you might be an exception and hey if you think the guy killed your brother maybe the solution IS to have sex with him about it.

"It'll be all right. We'll fix it." Somehow.

There are plenty of books you enjoy reading. You read a little here, you read a little there, and when you finish, you tell people, "Hey, that was a good book." There are books that you pick up, put down to get something else done, and then you don't get back to for another week or sometimes a month. And there are the books that you devour. The plot and the characters fill your every waking moment. You find yourself carving more and more time out of your day for reading or listening because you need to know what happens next. You sit idle in your car for far longer than you should after you get to where you're going because it means just a few more minutes of listening to the audiobook. The Mask of Mirrors and its sequels are some of those books.

Rook & Rose is a Venetian-inspired historical fantasy trilogy by M.A. Carrick, the pen name of co-authors Marie Brennan (A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, which I wrote about last year) and Alyc Helms (Adventures of Mr. Mystic), who met on an archaeological dig in Wales and Ireland. Their shared love of anthropology makes for a colorful tapestry of traditions, religions, and magic systems, and their time spent playing tabletop role-playing games together is what inspired this story.

Ren is coming back to the city that took everything from her. With her blood-sworn sister Tess in tow, she is determined to con her way to the top and take what she is owed. Nadežra, a port city and melting pot of cultures and peoples, is ruled by the colonizing Ligante nobility, while its native Vraszenian people are looked down on as lesser. It is into one of these Ligante families that Ren, a half-Vraszenian by birth, plans to inserts herself. Posing as the prodigal daughter of a long-estranged sister seeking reconciliation, all Ren needs to do is fake being rich long enough to be written into the Traementis family register. Then she and Tess will have enough money to live well, and escape from their troubled pasts, until the end of their days. Tess's skills with a needle and thread get her most of the way there, and Ren is able to pull off the rest of the transformation with the information she gathered and jewelry she stole while working as a maid for the disowned Letilia Traementis. The head of the family has her doubts, but her children are thrilled to accept Ren, or "Renanta Viraudax" into their luckless and diminished family. Just as everything is starting to fall into place, Ren starts running into problems: interference from the city's centuries-old hooded vigilante, the Rook; secrets held by Derossi Vargo, a Lower Bank crime lord with plans to make it big; the emergence of nightmare creatures from Vraszenian folklore, tied to a person from Ren's past who haunts her; and a plot to destroy the Wellspring, the heart of the conquered Vraszenian people. Now she must try to save a people who rejected her for not being wholly Vraszenian, all while trying to keep her many different masks from slipping.

This series sucked me in completely. The writing is seamless, especially for coming from two authors. The political drama and cleverly revealed secrets kept me listening well into the night. The audiobooks are amazing, with a fabulous narrator who differentiates well between not only the large cast of characters, but the different roles Ren takes upon herself. They're also a great way to consume small chunks of a relatively thick set of books. (Listening to the series did mean that I spent way too much time verifying the spelling of everything in this post, but you do what you've got to do.) All I'll say about the rest of the trilogy is that my husband pitched it to me as "Batman and Catwoman" vibes, and it delivers. I can't wait for M.A. Carrick's next series out in 2026, The Sea Beyond, a historical fantasy duology of scholarship, conquest, and faerie magic set in an alternate Spanish Golden Age.