Ahhh, this was so so good! What a wonderful book, honestly. It was a friend rec for that 12 friend recs in 12 months meme thing that was going around booktwt in the beginning of the year, and I’m so glad Kaz recc’d it to me!

Ace of Shades is the first book in a YA fantasy series that follows good-girl Enne trying to find her adoptive mother Lourdes and gang lord Levi who’s trying to get out from underneath an immense debt. I know one of the comps is Six of Crows and while I don’t really agree wholeheartedly, I do think that there’s a similar vibe, especially in the later half of the book.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the book — the characters were engaging, and I thought the plot was interesting. While I was a bit lost re: the worldbuilding and the different families and such, it wasn’t enough that I was completely confused on what was going on. I think it’s one of those things you pick up more as you go throughout the series. The beginning was a tad slow, but I think the story starts to really take hold and shine once you get past the first hundred pages. And even the first part of the book isn’t necessarily bad — I was enjoying the deep dive as Enne explored New Reynes trying to look for Lourdes. It just took a while to fully grip me is all.

But yeah, I really can’t wait to see what’s next for this crew of characters; I can tell it’s gonna be something big.

Ace of Shades by Amanda Foody is a book that I wish I’d liked more. Superficially there is a lot about it for me to love. A second world fantasy emphasizing a gritty and smoky city rather than swords and boards forests and plains, with a fresh twist in clear inspiration from the French Revolution. A very unique magic system for a steampunk style story. Unusually well-executed characters, in particular a protagonist that manages to be the naive and girly archetype without falling into annoying stereotypes. A plot pursuing the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist’s mysterious mother with the only clue being her mysterious connection to the end of the old political regime. This book has a lot in common with Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, which should endear it more to audiences generally and me in particular. And yet… And yet when I think back upon it I remember any number of gripes and grievances but little of what I actually enjoyed. As a natural hater this is not uncommon, but I do typically come away from a book with a lot more enthusiasm too. Shamefully (since the series was recommended to me on the strength of its final instalment) I’ve found myself putting off reading the sequels with the excuse that library holds required my immediate attention. Upon reflection the problem is that the good parts of the book are its most formulaic, and are not strong enough to overcome the many issues that pervade the novel. There are so many small annoyances: the magic system has this weirdly eugenic undertone that I could just never unsee, the weak plot throughline for a premise that really needed a strong one, the tonal swings between juvenile and mature. In the end the bad parts were so much more interesting than the good ones  that they were all I remembered. 

Ace of Shades opens as Enne Salta, débutante and ballerina from the idyllic and boring suburbs, steps off the boat into the notorious City of Sin, New Reynes after the disappearance of her mysterious political writer mother. Enne’s only lead is teen card shark Levi Glaisyer. Unfortunately, Levi is less help than she expected. He’s in over his head trying to bail himself out of the bottom of a pyramid scheme and has never heard of her mother. But when Enne offers him a lifesaving amount of money he agrees to help her. Their search drags Enne into the city’s notoriously sordid gambling district and its notoriously bloody past as she starts to realize just how many dangerous secrets her mother was hiding from her. Levi’s grasp on his failing scheme weakens and he learns just how little power he has among the new royalty of New Reynes’ casinos. All threads point towards the bloody deaths of the aristocracy of the old regime orchestrated by the mysterious and deadly Shadow Game. The deck is stacked against them and Levi and Enne will have to bet it all for a chance at survival. But at the end of the day the house will always win. 

As I struggled to summarize the plot it became very clear that Ace of Shades' sequence of events is weak. While I did avoid some plot beats to preserve a few of the better reveals, mostly I had trouble deciding what to include because individual events are not well unified into a single story. Scenes work fine in isolation in the context of the story I kept stopping to ask ‘wait, why is this important?’ For example, most plot threads will end with the characters going to bed and agreeing to meet up the next day, rather than taking the next step of the investigation. While it may be more realistic, it’s also a symptom that the leads not well connected. Rather than one leading (lol) into another, the protagonists pursue each clue to its disappointing conclusion, and then have to wait around for a new one to appear. It’s tough to follow how one event leads to the next, or how the actions of the protagonists change the events of the novel. While Ace of Shades is nominally a mystery, it is full of unrelated side arcs. As an example,

a recurrent thread is that Enne gets a job as an acrobat and is a natural talent. It’s supposed to represent Enne’s comfort in spite of herself with the comparative depravity of the big city, since this is the first time she’s been good at something. While this works in isolation it doesn’t support the mystery main arc, and it lowers the tension for Enne to stop investigating political intrigue to go to gymnastics practise.

Another extraneous detail is co-protagonist Levi. That hurts a little to write because his plot is more compelling due to its higher stakes. Failing to bail himself out of his pyramid scheme would lead not only to Levi’s death but the destruction of his gang and the members that rely on him. The problem is this has nothing to do with the disappearance of Enne’s mother. While one of the antagonists is involved in both, it’s only a coincidence.

Actually, the climactic sequence of the novel has a really tenuous logical connection to either protagonist’s storyline. The central problem of the story is largely shunted to the side in its last quarter, leaving me wondering how the characters got here.

It almost feels like an open world videogame: if you don’t feel like doing any main quests then why not spend a few hours playing through the questline of a street gang, or unlocking the acrobat skill tree, or playing the cards mini-game? This book needs to focus on one thing. Is it a mystery about a political journalist’s disappearance and its connection to the death of an old regime? Is it a thriller about Levi’s failing pyramid scheme and the shady casino Donna behind it all? Is it a coming of age story where Enne throws off the constraints of her conservative and boring upbringing? There is not enough book here to be all of them and the result is a compromise that’s much weaker than any on their own, like vegan coconut bacon. 

To be honest the overarching plot was not what I thought about the most while I was reading. It was the sort of thing that only really bothered me in retrospect. In the moment, the most compromised part of the experience was the worldbuilding. It is a land of contrasts, some fascinatingly good ideas and some so mindblowingly out of place I almost noped out of the entire series. First, the good. I did like the general concept of a setting rife with general hedonism: gambling, debauchery, drugs and alcohol, rather than the proliferation of murder in other gritty settings. There’s a lot of novelty to fantasy Las Vegas and the best character is the one most closely related to that concept (

it’s Vianca, who felt to me like an excellently darker version of Yubaba from Spirited Away

). The most interesting worldbuilding element of all is that the currency of this world is electricity, called ‘volts’. It can be stored in little charged orbs or beneath the skin like static depending on the user.

The climactic sequence plays off the thought that electricity was once believed to be the force that animated living creatures and differentiated them from dead and non-living ones. But the novel spends a tragically short amount of time on this.

About half way through the book I asked the friend that recommended it whether New Reynes also used electric lights. Casinos illuminated by literal burning money struck me as a perfect image for the cartels powering and profiting from the seedy side of New Reynes. We had to agree that it was unlikely that volts had been thought out to that extent. It felt as though these interesting details were added only to give the protagonists a cool aesthetic, not because they would contribute to the story. 

The pursuit of cool details without much thought into how they would work in service of the whole is what led to my dissatisfaction with the worldbuilding. Ace of Shades has a major issue with tonal inconsistency. It ping pongs between goofy crap and then elements so dark that I genuinely don’t know whether the author realized it. The most egregious example is Jack’s backstory. Jack is Levi’s sidekick and his more earnest and direct counterpart. He’s not particularly deep, except that his backstory is that

Levi saved him from addiction to fantasy opiates. This is a story where no one is allowed to say ‘fuck.’ It’s brought up several times for Levi to feel bad about not doing enough for his friend but it doesn’t really impact the plot and Jack himself never mentions it. Part of me wonders whether the author really grokked that 19th century drugs like laudanum are essentially the same opioids as modern heroin and fentanyl.

But on the other hand there are more incongruously dark (or simply mature) details.

The main antagonist for most of the book is openly a pedophile and attempts to sexually assault Enne specifically because she is dressed like a thirteen-year-old. Enne gets a female masturbation scene barely disguised with figurative language.

At the same time we’re not supposed to question just the most heinously on the nose names ever. Dark YA is not a bad thing. I’ve mentioned Six of Crows a couple times, which is a very dark YA novel to the point that it stretches credibility for the protagonists to be teenagers. The difference is that SoC is tonally consistent. It is dark all the time and on purpose. The setting is dark because it is taken incredibly seriously, and Ace of Shades, with its arbitrary details, its goofy fake swears, its low tension, just does not feel serious at all. 

The tone is annoying, but the magic system is genuinely bad. It is incredibly arbitrary, in other words, the magic does not have an internal logic or set of rules that govern its power and limitations. ATLA is a very logical magic system, Harry Potter is arbitrary. Arbitrary magic systems allow the author a lot of freedom to create powers that are cool and useful but at the risk of seeming overpowered, artificial, or even goofy. Ace of Shades’ magic feels extremely artificial throughout due to the massive power differences between different characters. The magic in this world ranges from barely supernatural (some people are unusually fast or strong but these powers do not really feel like they exceed the abilities of professional athletes) to essentially free mind control. The more powerful supernatural abilities have limitations that look like they’re taken directly from TTRPGs and never edited. For example,

Vianca, the story’s best villain, has the power of omerta, the ability to compel someone to follow her wishes. But she can only do it to three people at once like she’s using spell slots to cast it. The ability of the deposed royalty of old Reynes was to compel others to protect them no matter what. It makes sense that such a powerful ability would make the wielder a king, but in context these abilities are essentially the same as ‘olympic-level athlete’ and ‘good at math’. It makes sense for people with mind control abilities to be at the top of society, but the royals also had a hereditary talent for acrobatics, which doesn’t. It’s so arbitrary that it makes the rest of the system seem comical. I guess the author thought an acrobat character would be cool but didn’t really consider whether it would make sense in the setting? The arbitrary feeling undermines both the believability of the magic system as a whole and the twist reveal of Enne’s royal lineage. Acrobatics aren’t inherently associated with royalty, or even a particularly unusual ability in the real world, so it is not clear to the audience that this is a hint Enne is unique. The reveal feels contrived because the only way to anticipate it is to rely on one’s knowledge of YA tropes.

The physical and mind control powers are generally uncohesive, but there is a third type that feel like they’re just here for plot conveniences. Two in particular are

the ability to create volts (which is actually a whole bunch of powers including channelling electricity, natural talent for glasswork, and also heat resistant hands for some reason), and the ability to see what other people’s abilities are

. Both of these are extraordinarily convenient for the premise that it feels impossible for them to arise in what we are expected to believe is a natural hereditary ability and thus implicitly governed by principles like natural selection and evolution rather than usefulness. The extreme arbitrariness constantly pulled me out of the story and made its darker aspects hard to take seriously. 

To summarize, Ace of Shades is essentially fine. It’s a good book tackling an underutilized setting and concept, but it fails to use any of the new concepts it brings to the table, making it feel more formulaic than it should. While its more fundamental components were okay, the novel lost me with its frustrating, poorly thought out, and distracting details. Here’s hoping the sequel brings it back around. 

A very exciting book with an intriguing,  diverse, and morally grey cast of characters. A unique take on a magic-based world that felt incredibly real. Can’t wait to dive into the sequel!