Genre: Fantasy Age Range: YA Star Rating: 4 stars Series: standalone
Synopsis:
In a city that has been struck off the map, cursed to wander forever by the famed map magician Baba Yaga, a young girl called Siya accidentally finds the lost pieces of the magical map that will reunite her city with the rest of the world.
Always overlooked as the magic-less daughter of a powerful magician, she believes this is her moment to prove her worth. But instead of being celebrated, she is now hunted by powerful forces threatening the city.
With the help of her worst enemy, Feodor, Siya must unravel the mystery of why the Map Makers’ Guild is so desperate not to let the map be completed, find Baba Yaga and become the saviour of her city.
Synopsis taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here.
Review:
This book was nothing like what I expected, beyond a really quick, fun read. I did absolutely gulp this down, which was great for an end-of-year attempt to get my “books read” total up! This isn’t to say I didn’t really enjoy this book, it’s just that the blurb didn’t seem to set up the book I read very well.
I was expecting a rambling quest to find the pieces of the map, with an enemies-to-lovers romance smouldering away. Instead, what I got was two people uncovering the secrets of the guild that runs their city, finding out it’s not as glorious and good as the guild have made out. The pieces of the map aren’t really all that hard for them to find because they’ve been hidden by people holding secrets – so uncovering the secrets brings them to the map.
Also it’s not enemies-to-lovers. Feodor is not her worst enemy at all (that goes to a different boy in the book.) Instead she’s more resentful of the concept of him, full of magic and going to get a powerful position one day because of it. But she doesn’t hate him, because they haven’t really interacted, and once they do, they immediately act as friends and then become closer.
To be honest, I prefer that dynamic to enemies-to-lovers, so that was no loss at all for me. I just wish the blurb was a bit more representative of the book. This is a time when my expectations not being met was actually a good thing, because the expectations included elements I’m not a big fan of, but often it goes the other way.
For a book about a magic system that works with maps, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t a map included. Given the city is trapped away from the rest of the world, I didn’t expect there to be a world map, but a city map would have been nice and helped to work out where they were when traipsing around the city.
Read my reviews of other books by Lisa Lueddecke:
Standalones:
Skane:
Sifa Elizabeth Reads 
That does sound like a more intriguing romance than a lot of enemies-to-lovers. That said, I often try to read the books with less romance in them instead of more, not being really into romance. But it sounds like a cool book!
Yeah, it’s annoying how often blurbs are poorly representative of the book, but nice when the book turns out to be better than the blurb (I have seen this once or twice).
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Yeah, blurbs are so crucial to setting expectations and yet…
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