Blood Over Bright Haven

Recently, I went on a trip to Ireland with a large group of good friends. At one of our stops, we held some adorable lambs—one of which was barely a week old. Everyone was cuddling with and cooing over the lambs—we took selfies, group shots. We even picked the name for the youngest lamb!

But we left the farm and life moved on. A couple days later, I overheard a few of my friends in the group talking about the delicious lamb stew they’d had for lunch that day. To be honest, I thought they were kidding at first. The same people who were cooing over the adorableness of the lambs were now raving about how good they tasted?

I wondered, would my friends still have eaten the lamb stew if they’d seen the lamb being slaughtered? Or was it only the distance from the violence and blood that made eating the lamb palatable?

As humans, do we ignore distant pain for comfort and convenience? Are all humans hypocrites?

According to M. L. Wang’s standalone novel Blood Over Bright Haven, I would say the answer to both these questions is a resounding yes.

So, what’s the book about?

Driven, ambitious, and desperate for glory, Sciona Freynan is the first female highmage ever. In a world where women are considered too emotionally fragile to perform serious research, Sciona has become accustomed to breaking down any obstacles thrown in her way. 

When she is assigned a project that could greatly improve life in Bright Haven (the only city in the world safe from the mysterious blight), Sciona is ready to make her mark on the world. But as she delves deeper and deeper into her research, Sciona discovers a deadly secret that changes her world forever.

Part fantasy, part romance, part philosophical discussion, Blood Over Bright Haven is a captivating read that will keep the reader entranced until the very last page.

Instead of giving us a world of black and white, Wang paints in shades of gray.

In life (and in literature), we want the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad. Often, we can’t comprehend how someone empathetic, caring, and helpful—someone who we love—could support (implicitly or explicitly) practices we know to be harmful. It seems like a paradox that someone so loving and kind could do things so cruel and callous.

Sciona is a protagonist that feels realistic—too often protagonists are somehow immune from human bias and prejudice. Not Sciona. She’s prejudiced. She’s thoughtless. She’s reluctant to confront her own world view. But at the same time, she tries to do better and she does better.

Human beings are hypocrites—it’s in our nature. We always fall short of the ideals we profess to follow. But we can either confront the gap between our actions and our ideals, or we can pretend it doesn’t exist. Sciona is afraid to confront that gap. But she does it anyway, and that’s why we love her.

The plot kept me engaged the whole time. I will say, part of me wanted to stick with the “woman prevailing over sexist academia” theme (just because it was SO fun, and I was SO engaged with that part of the story), but where the plot actually ended up encouraged a lot of thoughtful self-reflection.

The way the book dealt with issues of sexism and racism was also very thought provoking. Oftentimes, I see novels portray racist characters as puppy-kicking nazis (always in stark contrast with the somehow anti-racist main character, who is surprisingly culturally aware even if they’ve never spoken to a person of a different culture in their life). I appreciated how Blood Over Bright Haven showed how nice people can still be racist, and how people can be racist without even knowing it.

In particular, we see Sciona’s slowly realize that many assumptions she had about the Kwen (the “other” race subjugated and mistreated by her society) were harmful and untrue (e.g., assuming they are less intelligent, thinking of them in one big group instead of in individual tribes and cultures, etc.). Sciona says so many things that the reader can immediately recognize as racist or biased, but she doesn’t recognize the harm in what she says until later.

What’s the worldbuilding like?

The world itself was interesting, if not wildly original—think New York in a 1950s fantasy world. However, I LOVED the magic system. Essentially, mages program magic like we would a computer, and they use this magic to power the city’s infrastructure and perform menial tasks. The system had very clear rules and structure, while not overwhelming the reader with a bunch of unnecessary, pseudosciencey details (cough Brandon Sanderson cough). The discoveries the main character makes about the magic feel reasonable to the reader (i.e., it doesn’t just feel like the author is making up new rules to make things easier for the protagonist).

Okay. But how’s the romance?

If you pick up this book looking for a cutesy romance, you will be partially disappointed. There were some romantic elements included in the story, but it’s clear that romance is not the main focus of the story.

I did feel like the romance was realistic, but it was definitely a subplot and not a main plot. (Although, it did describe how the male love interest smelled by page 85, so it’s not entirely trope-free.)

Overall thoughts?

This book was an absolute pleasure for me to read. Often, standalone novels rush pacing or have sloppy characterization, leaving me feeling unsatisfied at the end. I have to say, Blood Over Bright Haven nailed pacing and characterization, making the ending thought-provoking, bittersweet, yet somehow satisfying.

My one critique is that sometimes the dialogue was a little too unrealistically philosophical. On several occasions, Sciona had conversations that were only thinly veiled interior monologues. It wasn’t too bad though—I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it only happened once, but by the third time it started getting a little old.

Give it a try! It’s a worthwhile read that will really make you think.