The Raven Scholar
Antonia Hodgson
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780316577229
Orbit, April 15 2025, 704 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome to another book review! This month we’re going to dive into a vividly imagined world of magic, treachery, heartbreak, and hope—in The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson.

The Raven Scholar focuses primarily on the story of Neema Kraa, a brilliant yet socially awkward scribe who wants nothing more than to write monographs on her favorite obscure subjects and hopefully have someone eventually read them. Unfortunately for Neema, a single decision plucks her from her dingy room above a trash heap and thrusts her straight into the focus of the Imperial Court, a place she most decidedly does not feel welcome even after years of being one of the Emperor’s most trusted advisors. Despite her rise to power, Neema still agonizes over the decision she made long ago, and with the Emperor due to step down at the end of his twenty-four-year reign, the echoes of that choice start coming back to haunt her and everyone else involved.

I found The Raven Scholar to be a fascinating book on multiple levels, the first of which was Hodgson’s command of description and tone. The writing in this book is like sinking into a dream world, drawn in evocative phrases that never overstay their welcome. While the world of The Raven Scholar has some obvious influences, Hodgson blends them all together so deftly it’s impossible not to picture her world as another universe entirely. Whether it was setting the stage for a party filled with conniving courtiers, the stop-start chaos of a stadium duel, or the languid otherness of gods descending from the heavens, Hodgson’s vision comes through clear and strong in a way that made me unable to stop turning the pages.

The second thing I enjoyed about The Raven Scholar was the people. While Hodgson focuses primarily on Neema as the protagonist of the book, there are plenty of asides and opportunities to get to know the rest of the cast—and what a cast it is. There is the trickster friend, the brooding warrior, the tyrannical emperor, the mercurial narrator . . . and the amazing feat that Hodgson pulls is that those initial descriptions both sum up the characters and barely scratch the surface. Every person in The Raven Scholar is chock-full of life, desire, fears, and flaws, and each time Hodgson pulled the curtain back a little farther, revealing a little more, it was never in a way I expected and always in a way that made the book continue to grow better.

The last thing that struck me about The Raven Scholar is that even though it feels like being transported to a different world, it is also very much a contemporaneous story of our time. It is a story of people being forced into impossible decisions by engines they don’t control, and then having to figure out how to live with the outcome. It is a story of those who have everything trying to find a way to seize even more. It is a story of resistance, of rebellion, and of finding love even when it seems impossible to do so. It is a human story of loss and pain and grief, of triumph and tiny moments of joy, and it is the struggle we all face against those who can never have enough.

Overall, The Raven Scholar was an absolute delight to read, and it sets Hodgson as an author to watch for in the future. This is just the first book in a planned trilogy, and if she can keep up this level of excellence (or somehow, surpass it), then it will be magnificent. I am eagerly awaiting whatever comes next, because Neema’s story (and all the others) is among one of the best I’ve read in years.