So I really was looking forward to this book. Knowing it was on the Asexual book club list, I expected more sexual diversity than your typical fantasy novel and was not disappointed. Except I also was? Being that it's stated in the bio that the author is asexual, I was definitely awaiting a prominent asexual character to make an appearance, but that never happened. As far as I could tell, none of the characters were, or at least not that it was mentioned or really implied. I've heard tell that this is the first book in a series, so maybe some characters will be revealed later, but it was kind of surprising me to find that lack in this novel. There were other non-heterosexualities in this book though, lesbians being the most prominent, including the main character, Guerline.

(EDIT: Okay, so I looked into this a bit more, and found a post here, where the author talks about her writing and the importance of representation. In it she states clearly that in From Under the Mountain there is no explicit representation of asexual people, but that some characters were canonically asexual (Theodor for example), which might be explored more in the sequel.)

I enjoyed the plot of the story a lot though. The witches and political set-up are fairly unique, I think, at least to my reading history. It got a bit convoluted and open-ended at the end though, possibly because there might be a sequel, or possibly because the author was going for a moral-grey area type thing, which I don't think she quite achieved if that was the case.

Spoiler

One of the major issues I had with it was some of the character relationships. Specifically - Desmond. What the hay?! You're seriously going to make a move on your crush while she is literally crying over the body of her recently, violently dead lover? WAT? And I mean, okay, he's a douchebag. Clearly. So at some point there's going to be some conspiracy going on and he's going to turn evil and he'll die at the end like he deserves, right? Right?? Nope! Not only does he survive, but he's still a "good guy" and stays friends with Guerline. The only saving grace is that there wasn't any indication of them even vaguely getting together at the end like I feared when he kept not turning evil and dying.

Anyway, I did enjoy it for the most part. The writing wasn't great some of the time, but the action was good enough to keep me reading and interested. I also really liked the idea of magic being a finite resource, and would be interested to see how that continues if there is a sequel.