December 6, 2023 · Book Review
by Natalie Gibson
Lady Ramillia Winmoore is twelve years old when she wakes strapped to a table in a Victorian asylum for the criminally insane, told she butchered her own parents and has no memory of it. What actually happened to her, and what she is, unspools slowly and never comfortably: she is a “Carrier,” one of a hidden bloodline of the nearly unkillable, and her freedom from that asylum comes at the price of a marriage arranged since before she was born, to a man who has been shaping her whole existence from the shadows.
What follows refuses to stay a single story. A rescue becomes a trap, a trap becomes a education in exactly how deep the rot of immortality goes, and a mother’s fight to protect her children becomes something far larger and far darker: a reckoning that eventually spans continents, empires, and centuries, carried by a narrator whose own mind has splintered into pieces just to survive what was done to her.
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