Synopsis:
A desperate girl at a cutthroat magical academy faces a choice between life and death: become an assassin for the enchanted elite or watch her decaying body draw its last breath.
Anabelle Gage is trapped in a male body, and it’s rotting from the inside out. In Caimor, where the magical elite buy and swap designer bodies like clothes, Ana can’t afford to escape her tattered form. When she fails the entrance exam to the prestigious Paragon Academy, her last hope of earning a new body implodes. As the clock ticks down to her last breath, she’s forced to use her illusion magic to steal a healthy chassis—before her own kills her.
But Ana is caught by none other than the headmaster of Paragon Academy, who poses a brutal ultimatum: face execution for her crime or become a mercenary at his command. Revolt brews in Caimor’s smog-choked underworld, and the wealthy and powerful will stop at nothing to take down the rebels and the infamous dark witch at their helm, the Black Wraith.
With no choice but to accept, Ana will steal, fight, and kill her way to salvation. But her survival depends on a dangerous band of an impulsive assassin, a brooding bombmaker, and an alluring exile who might just spell her ruin. As Ana is drawn into a tangled web of secrets, the line between villain and hero shatters—and Ana must decide which side is worth dying for.
Review:
Remember that 90’s action movie with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, Face/Off? Right in the middle of Travolta’s big comeback and Cage’s huge run of blockbusters, we got this fun hero/villain face swap movie that sometimes made it hard to know who to root for. To a certain extent, that’s a bit of what I saw in the back of my mind as I read through Petra Lord’s new novel, Queen of Faces. There’s a lot of face (or body in this case) swapping that was fun at first, but by the time I finished with the novel, it left me a bit exhausted with each and every twist Lord stuck in her debut novel.
In some ways, it felt like Lord put this firmly in a fantasy world, but there are moments with society and life that mirror our own so much, it felt like there was a possibility that Ana and her friends are fighting for the future of a futuristic Earth. EIther way, in Queen of Faces, magic exists for a select few and up until recently, some of those who had been awakened to their magic were selected to attend a secret magic academy (ala Hogwarts).
In addition to the magic potential, the world’s technology has advanced significantly to allow people to simply load their consciousness to another chassis (her term for substitute bodies). When the book begins, our protagonist Ana is already living in a body she wasn’t born into — an Edgar (a clever reference to the Edgar-Suit from Men in Black?) which is the lowest tier of bodies. Edgars are male-coded chassis and yet Ana still identifies as female throughout the book and treats her as such.
Which brings up the point — this entire book has multiple allegories for the trans experience. Many of the characters are very cavalier about it all and at one point, it’s brought up that a key leader in the past had 17 different bodies during their lifetime.
I didn’t have any issues with the body swapping in general, but by about halfway through Queen of Faces, it became a little cumbersome when Ana and her mercenary partner Wes would go on missions and inevitably their quarry wouldn’t look like their file photo or is acting differently than they should or some variation. When everyone in the world can swap bodies at a moment’s notice, of course the criminals and villains would take advantage of this and sow chaos under a disguise no one saw coming.
There are a lot of great ideas in this book, but the body swapping confusion took me out of the story a few times. In the end, I didn’t really understand a few of the characters’ motivations and their own expectations for how certain things would play out, but seeing as how this is supposed to be a Young Adult novel, I can forgive some of that with their hormones taking over.
I enjoyed much of Queen of Faces, but I wish there was a little more attention paid to certain aspects.
Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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