“I don’t understand reviews sometimes,” he said, as the first sentence of his book review.

I have received two books through my new Illumicrate subscription– one, Fathomfolk, was already on my radar, but Elizabeth May’s To Cage a God was a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of. Which sounds like snark, but I hope it’s obvious that it isn’t– there are lots and lots of books, as it turns out! Anyway, I looked it up on Goodreads when I was ready to start it, and … well, it didn’t look hopeful. Generally anything under a 3.5 is going to be a rocky road, and this is at 3.3 right now. Sometimes that happens solely because a book is written by a woman or a person of color, though, or– God forbid– features women or people of color, or The Gays, so it’s not always a useful metric, but it’s usually a fair bet that an aggregate score under 3.5 is going to be a mixed read at best.

I’m happy to say, having read the book, that I don’t have any idea what the hell the reviewers are on about on this one. This book is indeed written by a woman, and does feature The Gays, but scanning through the reviews didn’t immediately produce any reviews that appeared to be the result of a pile-on or a Neanderthal eruption, so I just stopped looking and stopped worrying about it.

To Cage a God is a political thriller wrapped up in an intriguing magic system with a dollop of romantasy on top, and at its best moments it reminded me of something that Lisbeth Campbell might have written. And, honestly, this book and The Vanished Queen have a lot in common, and although To Cage a God has the romantasy aspect and tilts just a bit more toward YA than Queen does, if you enjoy one you’ll likely enjoy the other.

I want to talk about that magic system for a bit, though, because it’s super cool. All of the POV characters are part of a conspiracy against the Evil Empress (not actually her name, but it’s more fun to call her that) and all of them have different motivations and abilities that they bring to the revolution. Magic abilities in this world are granted by literally– and, it’s implied at least, physically, take a close look at the cover– imprisoning a dragon inside your body, and dragons are gods. The book uses the words pretty interchangeably, but the gods have teeth and claws and move around and are not remotely beyond inflicting pain on their hosts if they feel like it. In fact, one character’s god hates her and she has to more or less practice blood magic in order to convince it to do anything. The gods also have opinions about each other, and at least one relationship in the book is driven by mutual attraction of the gods as much as the humans involved. It’s really cool, and I’m looking forward to more exploration of the idea in the conclusion to the series, which I believe is currently planned as a duology but stands really well by itself. All of this stands against the background of a war with another nation that is talked about but never appears on the page, so I assume the sequel will delve into figuring out what to do with the new political status quo at the end of the book.

I have some minor gripes– the Evil Empress is a bit much, but in a sort of delightful way– one can imagine Glenn Close or Angelina Jolie just devouring scenery by the handful while playing this character, and the book as a whole is a little tropey, but tropes become tropes because when they’re well done they’re effective, and they are. It’s always nice to pick a book effectively at random and be rewarded by it, and I didn’t even pick this one, so it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to recommend it. I’ve ordered the non-Illumicrate hardback so that I have something to match the sequel on the shelf when it comes out. You don’t need to buy two copies, but definitely check it out.