There are novels that conjure atmosphere, and there are novels that become atmosphere. Innamorata by Ava Reid belongs to the second kind: a dark, decadent gothic fantasy in which the dead are scraped and parcelled into noble inheritances, love is high treason, and the most powerful thing a woman can do is refuse to speak.
Set on the island of Drepane — a necromancer’s paradise long since crushed under a conqueror’s boot — the book opens with a corpse desecration. The elderly Adele-Blanche, Mistress of Teeth, has died. As leeches from seven rival noble houses harvest her blood, bones, and teeth, we meet Agnes: her silent, bruise-clad granddaughter who has not spoken in seven years and watches proceedings with the composure of someone who has never expected mercy from the world and stopped asking for it. She does not mourn. She plots.
Agnes is, without qualification, one of the most compelling protagonists gothic fantasy has produced in years. Trained since childhood to be simultaneously ascetic monk, visionary prophet, and covert necromancer, she carries her dynasty’s ambitions carved literally into her flesh — Adele-Blanche’s edicts for Agnes’s body and behaviour were etched there by blade. Her silence is not a wound inflicted on her but a weapon she forged from wreckage and now wields with devastating precision. From page one, Innamorata by Ava Reid makes clear it intends to be the story of a woman discovering what she has always been capable of, if only the world would stop mistaking her stillness for weakness.
The Architecture of Drepane
The world-building here is meticulous, almost obsessive in the best possible way. The Septinsular Covenant — the oppressive treaty imposed on Drepane by the conquering mainlander Berengar generations prior — forbids burial, prayer, and magic. Every corpse must be desecrated, its parts distributed among the seven noble houses: blood, teeth, bones, eyes, lungs, hearts, flesh. It is a system engineered not merely to govern but to humiliate, reducing death to a bureaucratic redistribution of tissue.
Reid’s particular genius lies in placing beauty inside the horror. Castle Peake, ancestral seat of the House of Teeth, is openly scorned by every soul on the island for its ugliness — yet behind its crumbling battlements blooms a courtyard overrun with poisonous flowers, and at the top of its slippery obsidian stairs sits a forbidden library that Adele-Blanche kept meticulously, loved jealously, and used for treason. Castle Crudele, by contrast, is the gleaming fortress where the royal family rules, and it holds its own archive of secrets beneath its salt-bleached walls. The contrast between these spaces — one decayed and vital, one radiant and hollow — mirrors everything the novel is doing with its characters.
The moth language system alone, a cipher bred by the conquering Berengar to communicate in wartime but now become Agnes and the prince’s private vocabulary, is one of the loveliest conceits in recent fantasy. Gray for grief. Fuchsia for a forward march. Speckled like birch bark, for an apology.
The Slow Burn of Being Seen
Liuprand, the golden-haired prince betrothed to Agnes’s beautiful cousin Marozia, could easily have been a prize or a foil. Reid makes him a genuine intelligence instead — a man who reads alone in a guarded library, who carries a scrap of paper with two scrawled words on it as though it were a sacred relic, who sees Agnes when the entire court mistakes her stillness for death. Their courtship, conducted through borrowed moths and silent hours among books and the grazed warmth of a single ring, is the emotional engine of Innamorata by Ava Reid. There are no grand declarations here, only the slow accumulation of being witnessed.
The triangle between Agnes, Marozia, and Liuprand is handled with psychological acuity rather than melodrama. Marozia is imperious, radiant, and genuinely fond of her cousin in the possessive way of someone who has never had to consider what their fondness costs. Agnes loves her without illusion and serves her without total submission. The crack that forms between them is not caused by the prince but by something older — the recognition that their lives were always arranged for Marozia’s benefit and Agnes’s usefulness, and that this arrangement is now breaking apart of its own accumulated weight.
Prose That Cuts and Cures
Reid’s style, familiar to readers of A Study in Drowning, Juniper & Thorn, and Lady Macbeth, reaches a new apex of controlled extravagance here. She is equally at home with clinical grotesque — organs stomped into mud, a hand pinned to a banquet table, a tumour erupting through a calf — and something more languid and achingly beautiful. A room of moths, light filtering through their membranous wings. The weight of a pearl ring, too small to be noticed by anyone but the one who placed it there. She never lingers on beauty without purpose, and she never delivers horror without earning the impact.
The Scars Worth Naming
Innamorata by Ava Reid is not without its imperfections.
- The necromancy quest fades. Agnes arrives at Castle Crudele with a mission: find the forbidden spell-words buried in Berengar’s library, resurrect Adele-Blanche, restore the House of Teeth to its dead-wielding glory. By the novel’s final act, this quest has been almost entirely absorbed by the romance. Readers drawn by the promise of death magic may feel shortchanged precisely when the stakes should be sharpest.
- Pacing dips in the middle. The extended Castle Crudele section, between the wedding and Agnes’s departure, is rich in texture and slow in motion. Certain scenes feel like variations already played rather than new notes struck.
- Marozia deserves more. The psychological dynamic between the cousins is one of the novel’s richest territories, but Marozia herself — for all her vivacity — never quite achieves the dimensionality of the other major players. She arrives and departs, mostly, as a force of nature rather than a full character.
None of these are fatal flaws in a book of this ambition. But they keep Innamorata from being as complete as its finest passages suggest it could be.
The Series Ahead
Innamorata opens the House of Teeth duology; the second and concluding volume remains to be titled and published. The threads left loose here are substantial: the forbidden library’s secrets, the unraveling relationship between Crown and island, a prince whose marriage is political and whose devotion is anything but. This is a first book that earns its sequel — even if it leaves you aching to already have it.
If This Haunts You, Try These
- A Study in Drowning — Ava Reid (same author; equally lush and waterlogged with dread)
- Juniper & Thorn — Ava Reid (folklore horror with the same gift for visceral beauty)
- Lady Macbeth — Ava Reid (morally complex female protagonist in historical gothic)
- Mexican Gothic — Silvia Moreno-Garcia (colonial horror, suffocating atmosphere)
- Spinning Silver — Naomi Novik (quiet female power inside brutal fairy tale logic)
- The Priory of the Orange Tree — Samantha Shannon (ambitious female-centred epic world-building)
Innamorata by Ava Reid is for readers who believe prose is not merely a vehicle but the destination itself, that silence can speak louder than any scream, and that love — when it arrives after a lifetime of deliberate deprivation — should feel like the breaking of something ancient and essential. It is grotesque and luminous in equal measure. It will not let you go quickly.