words by Millie Harris

What do we mean when we say a city is advanced? Do we mean that its machines run, its scholars are knowledgeable, the lights are on, and its citizens are able to live a life of comfort? Blood Over Bright Haven may be a fantasy novel, but its questions are not fantastical in the slightest. The author M. L. Wang has created a city built upon magic, however, despite the lack of magic in our world today, the core of what this city represents feels quite terribly familiar. At the centre of Blood Over Bright Haven is our main protagonist, Sciona, an intelligent woman determined to become the first female Highmage. I found myself rooting so fervently for her and her achievements, and yet, as the novel unfolds, the story of one woman breaking into power becomes a far more devastating inquiry into what power costs, and who pays for it.

Tiran presents itself as a city of brilliance: an industrial centre powered by magic and intellect. However, we very quickly see that this same ‘dazzling’ city is built upon deeply embedded prejudice. Sciona enters the High Magistry knowing she will face hostility because she is a woman, and the novel wastes no time proving her right. Her male colleagues patronise her, undermine her, and seize every opportunity to remind her that, regardless of her talent, she is unwelcome there. As a result, she is denied the properly trained laboratory assistant customarily granted to a Highmage and instead, is assigned Thomil, a janitor from the Kwen refugee population.

Somewhere in his time playing mage’s assistant, he had forgotten what he was: not a citizen of this city, just flesh that it fed on. (p.196)

Sciona knows how it feels to be belittled, shut out, and treated as lesser, but that does not mean she has much meaningful understanding of what Tiran has done to the Kwen people. The book is very clear-eyed on how being harmed in one way does not automatically mean you understand every aspect of oppression. Sciona is quite frustrating for that reason, and is written to be so. At first, she barely challenges anti-Kwen prejudice as the society that has demeaned her has also, still, taught her everything she knows. I appreciated that she isn’t written as an automatically righteous heroine. She is ambitious, blinkered, self-involved and unmistakably still moulded by the world she imagines she’s resisting. That made her feel more real and human than a heroine whose suffering goes hand in hand with a perfected moral clarity in something she simply does not understand.

As Sciona spends more time with Thomil, the novel prises open the truth behind Tiran’s ‘language of progress’. M.L. Wang never reduced Thomil’s character to a device for another character’s moral enlightenment; he has his own grief, anger and life that we instantly encounter in the novel. If Sciona has spent her life trying to prove she deserves a place within Tiran, Thomil understands what that place means for people like him, since Tiran built itself through the subjugation of his people. Their relationship is tense, argumentative and shaped by entirely different lived experiences. For Sciona, magic is achievement, study, mastery. For Thomil, he reveals that, in his eyes, such a view is just arrogant when his people are suffering in the name of a specific magical future they never chose to have. For one, power is a ladder, for the other, it is the boot. Through their characters, the novel asks: Who do we become when the truth is worse than a lie? 

“It’s not enough to have meant to do good; if you don’t do good, most gods — those of the rivers, the sky, and the fields — don’t care for your motivations. Why should they?” (p.148)

The novel’s true power lies in its relentless interrogation of intentions and consequences. Again and again, it asks what moral value intention has once its effects become catastrophic, and whether good outcomes can ever absolve corrupted motivations. This question is the book's backbone; the politics, character dynamics and magic system all orbit this philosophical inquiry. Each revelation pushes the characters closer to decisions that cannot be made on personal feeling alone; they must answer to something larger than themselves. This ethical element, more so than any singular twist, is what lingered long after the final page for me.

Sciona herself is, I think, the book’s greatest achievement. She is truly formidable: gifted, abrasive, selfish, and utterly consumed by ambition. We are given a female protagonist uninterested in being modest or agreeable; Sciona wants to be first. She wants to be in the history books for doing what no woman before her has been permitted to do. She aspires to greatness before goodness. Nonetheless, her ambition may have made her brilliant, but it has also narrowed her view of the world. For much of the novel, her understanding of injustice extends only as far as what she has personally endured. But what made me root for her so fiercely was not that she was good from the beginning, but that she keeps struggling towards something better. She still makes missteps and mistakes, but she truly attempts to become less self-absorbed, less invested in her own exceptionalism, and more willing to accept what is true. She tries. At points, I found myself intensely frustrated on her behalf because she is surrounded by people often unwilling to believe or care about the sincerity of that effort. Even when she is genuinely trying to be better, people view her as though she is still at her worst.

Whatever happened next, whether it led to Hell or Heaven, she was going to have a hand in directing it. Sick or sound, good or evil, she was still Sciona Freynan. And Sciona Freynan didn’t slow down. Sciona Freynan would be remembered. (p.219)

From a structural standpoint, I found Blood Over Bright Haven extraordinarily difficult to put down. It begins as though it will be the story of an ambitious woman forcing her way into an elite institution that has excluded her, and honestly, I would already have been happy to read that book. But then, the book begins to dismantle that same story. As the scope of the story widens, the Magistry’s prestige appears to be a cover for something far more violent with each new discovery reshaping the plot entirely. This structure suits the academic setting beautifully; I felt I was combing through the archives alongside Sciona, page after page, hunting for answers. Even the magic is bureaucratised; it is studied, written and operationalised through precise symbolic commands, executed through specialised machines that felt as if they were half typewriter and half calculator. They work through formulas, co-ordinates, and mathematical equations to direct energy into practical outcomes that power the city’s everyday functions. Despite the shifting main plot, the novel maintains a very distinct voice throughout, and everything felt very deliberately linked together.

The one place where I occasionally felt a slight drag was in some of the more heavily expository passages, where the historical context and world building are told in very dense sections. The information itself is rarely uninteresting, but those chapters certainly felt more laborious to move through. Even so, I never felt the novel losing its grip on me. If anything, there’s an appropriateness to its density. After all, this is a novel filled with archives and buried histories, so we, the reader, also experience the novel through inquiry. The effort of uncovering what has been concealed is described so thoroughly, that it makes sense the reader should sometimes feel that labour too.

The brightest meadows grew from dead things. (p.197)

By the end, Blood Over Bright Haven had completely won me over. M. L. Wang uses the fantasy genre to examine the deep themes of how power legitimises itself through controlled knowledge, and the human cost hidden beneath so-called ‘progress’. This is a novel with a compelling plot and a vivid world, leaving me feeling both entertained and challenged. Even where the novel is dense, that density never dimmed its brilliance for me. I could not imagine rating it any less than five stars.