Review: The Familiar

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bardugo's got a pretty extensive contract to write as many as 12 new books now, and I'm thinking this standalone fantasy novel was just the first of them. It's very definitely a Bardugo book in a lot of ways - dark, moody atmosphere, strange magic, Jewish protagonist struggling to hold on to her tenuous links to her culture, a mysterious bad-boy kind of love interest? All of the above, represented.

I'm actually very sad to say that this book wound up surprisingly hype-damaged - my expectations, being that it was Bardugo, were very high, but this book just didn't live up to her usual standards for me. I'll still be generous and give it a 2.5 rounded up to a 3, but I was really hoping for at least a 4. Unfortunately, what really made me like this book less was how oddly sluggish the pacing was (especially since the book was actually shorter than expected - I don't know why, but I was convinced it would be over 500 pages at least), as well as the baffling decision to give POV time to a variety of other characters I couldn't care less about, such as Valentina. Hell, even Luzia felt like an unusually half-baked protagonist by Bardugo standards - somehow both an old soul and yet childlike in a lot of ways too. Bardugo definitely gave the vast majority of the personality to Luzia's aunt Hualit, and it shows.

That said, Bardugo absolutely shines, as always, in her darkly atmospheric style, as well as her highlighting of historical atrocities. Being set in medieval Madrid after the Reconquista, naturally there's a lot of Inquisition horror to worry about. Though Luzia isn't exactly religiously Jewish anymore, she's still ethnically so, and has to hide that from the wrong higher-ups in society while also calling on what little she knows of her ancestral culture to perform her magic. Which, as you can imagine, is very difficult when she barely speaks any Ladino, not to mention Hebrew (and back then, Hebrew was almost extinct as a first language, centuries away from its current revival.)

I'm going to guess that this book is officially in the same universe as, say, Ninth House. There's definitely some room for overlap, with Sephardic protagonists trying to channel strange magic - hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Bardugo eventually said this was a prequel with Luzia being an ancestor of Alex Stern.

But I really hope Bardugo's next book is better (especially if she does the third book in either the Ninth House or Six of Crows series like I'm really waiting for...)

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