The Raven Scholar is an epic fantasy that provides some new twists and avenues for familiar genre conventions.
Class and social distinctions. Longstanding grudges and plans within plans. Unusual use of point of view, including effective omniscient and at first unexplained points of view. Strong grounding in personal relationships. Unexpected revelations.
These are the themes and tropes of Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar.
The bare bones of the story, laid out, would not seem out of place in a lot of fantasy novels. The whole idea of "country mouse" going to the city and trying to thrive there against all odds is one that goes back at least to the Roman Empire, and probably a lot earlier, too. Our titular Raven Scholar, Neema Kraa is just that.
But the novel keeps us off balance right from the beginning. Neema is a side character for the opening of the book, and in fact does not appear in that opening or seems to have any importance, at first. The opening of the book revolves around a mother and her two children under the equivalent of house arrest since their father led a bloody insurrection. The Emperor gives the male child a choice, and sets off a chain of events that runs through the center of the book. The female child undergoes a slow and painful death, the male child trains to try and succeed the Emperor, and our titular Raven Scholar is summoned to give a historic flourish to the decision.
Jump forward in time, and our Raven Scholar is a member of the court, although she is far more interested in her studies than courtly intrigue. Intrigue finds her, however, and by twist and turns, and unwilling response, finds herself in a deadly competition to succeed the Emperor. The fact that her friend (and perhaps more than a friend) is also in this competition only heightens matters. And Neema is keeping secrets...as is everyone else in this competition and this court.
All of that, with Neema trying just to do House Raven credit in the competition and not discredit it with a bad performance would make for an effective and interesting novel. There are plenty of interesting and often tangled secrets, lies, betrayals, alliances and conflicts among the participants to succeed the Emperor (the Emperor is an selected, term limited position) . Even the backstory and secret intrigues that Neema and the reader are only slowly made aware of are part and parcel of what would normally be a fine and upstanding fantasy novel, one worth recommending if one likes the intrigue and schemes of a "Deadly decadent court".
In addition to all of that, we get a novel that nearly bursts at the seams with rich worldbuilding detail. We learn a tremendous amount, fed to us in a steady stream, of the scheming Houses, long standing social tensions, history, philosophy, literature and more of this world. While the action really is restricted to mainly one island where the Emperor lives, the world beyond that island feels visible, tangible and real.
And then there are the characters. We start with Neema, our titular Raven Scholar, our country mouse turned city mouse and dumped into the deep end, but her history and background turn out to be more complex than first indicated. This is also true (and sometimes surprises even to themselves) of all of the contestants, the Emperor, and many of the other secondary characters. Many of them have full fledged character arcs or the appearances of same, they hew and defy their Houses, they are remarkably three-dimensional and human, uniformly. These are the kind of people you can imagine meeting for dinner and really having a sense of how they'd act. (looking at you, Cain! (but not JUST the scion of the Fox)).
The best way the novel handles this is in the trials and competition. The way the competition to become the next Emperor is by a series of bouts and a series of trials, one for each of the Houses. We get a sense of the characters both from how they do in the trials...but also in the design of their own trials for the others. (One does not participate in their own trial, of course). How Cain and the Foxes see the world and really are is seen in the Fox Trial, and Neema's Raven trial is also illumianting, but even something like the Ox Trial shows that the steady and patient Oxes (including our Ox trial participant) are NOT the simpletons and fools that the rest of the Empire makes them out to be.
But where this novel really shines is the extra that it brings. The novel feels like it is in the tradition of a stratum of fantasy novels and stories in a mode that Jenn Lyons' A Chorus of Dragons series did not invent, but certainly is a strong and striking example of it. The novel uses unusual points of view (including omniscient ones and ones whose provenance and nature are not explained at first) to give a wide kaleidoscope of what is going on. The novel sometimes feels like a slowly emerging picture from a jigsaw puzzle. Certainly, with a murder mystery on tap, that was going to be baked in, regardless. Certainly with all of the moving pieces of the various factions, plots and plans, that was going to be the case. But the unusual and extra point of view and allowing the reader to have more of a sense of what is going on than even the biggest characters, and the social and literary commentary on the proceedings from within the world, The Raven Scholar really comes together as a stunning example of the form. It's on the low end of true doorstoppers (650 pages or so) but it feels like with all that it is in here on offer, that it is longer, still, with what is all offered.
R R Virdi's Tales of Tremaine also sits in the same space as the Lyons series and what Hodgson is doing here in the Raven Scholar, as well. The slightly metafictional commentary on the nature of the story, as well as the stories within stories that all three series employ, seem to be part of genre conversation on the nature of story that has always been there¹, but has been getting more of it lately. Writers like Hodgson, Virdi, and Lyons are interrogating fantasy stories on multiple levels by using these sorts of devices.
I say, then, though, that The Raven Scholar is not a "101 book" for genre readers. If you have never read a fantasy novel in your life, starting your fantasy reading here is probably going to be a potential exercise in frustration and confusion.² Or at the very least, you won't get as much mileage out of the book as if you have already read some fantasy novels and are ready for the usual tropes and devices to be deployed and subverted.³ But if you are ready for that gear shift, The Raven Scholar is here as an excellent new book to explore this region of genre space.
Highlights
- Complex, complicated and intriguing Epic Fantasy
- Excellent set of characters
- Doorstopper: Feature, not Bug
Reference
Hodgson, Antonia, The Raven Scholar, [Orbit, 2025]
¹After all, take Scheherazade as an example. Or even The Odyssey, which has a lot more of Odysseus recounting things than you'd think. In fact, the whole bit about the trojan horse is from the Odyssey, NOT the Iliad.
² The older science fiction model that comes to mind here is Dune. (and whether or not Dune is really SF or just Fantasy in SF garb is a whole other essay). But the points of view, the deep dives into character, the literary history, the framing of the Dune story, the subversion of tropes (sometimes so subtly that too many people don't even realize they are being subverted) are things that readers who have not read much SF can entirely miss.
³ In a different way, the metafictional books Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler are doing that subversion, but from a much more punchier populist angle rather than a literary one.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
