In the rotting shell of a borrowed body, desperation becomes its own kind of magic.
Queen of Faces by Petra Lord arrives like a lightning strike to the young adult fantasy landscape—sharp, uncompromising, and crackling with the raw energy of a protagonist who refuses to let death have the final word. This debut plunges readers into Caimor, a drowning world where the wealthy purchase bodies like haute couture while the desperate cling to decaying flesh, and where a single entrance exam separates salvation from oblivion.
A Body Borrowed, A Life Stolen
Anabelle Gage’s predicament cuts deeper than surface-level body horror. Trapped in a male Edgar chassis—a cheap, defective body that’s literally rotting from within—she represents every marginalized individual watching doors slam in their face. Her grey skin spreads like a disease, her missing pinky a permanent reminder of powerlessness, and her lungs burn with every breath she steals from borrowed time. When Paragon Academy rejects her application for the third time (a devastating 77.4 out of the required 95 points), Ana makes a choice that transforms her from desperate victim to cunning survivor: she steals a healthy body from a cargo ship.
This act of theft—visceral, illegal, and utterly understandable—sets Queen of Faces by Petra Lord apart from sanitized coming-of-age narratives. Ana doesn’t wait for rescue. She takes what society denies her, consequences be damned, and in doing so, she stumbles into a web far more tangled than simple body theft.
The Price of Desperation
Headmaster Nicholas Carriwitch catches Ana red-handed but offers an alternative to execution: become his mercenary, infiltrate Paragon as “David Chapman,” a Grey Coat assistant, and hunt down Khaiovhe—the Black Wraith—a legendary dark witch leading the revolutionary group Commonplace. The deal is Faustian in its asymmetry. Ana gains access to the school of her dreams and a chance at a new body, but she must navigate a double life, complete impossible missions, and confront enemies who could erase her existence with a flick of their wrist.
Lord’s world-building shines in these opening sequences. Paragon Academy floats above Elmidde on enchanted islands, accessible only via invisible cable cars that shimmer in sunset light. The magic system—built on four schools (Physical, Sinew, Praxis, and Whisper) and powered by specialized intelligence—feels both intricate and organic. Ana’s Codex, Rainbow Veil, creates visual illusions that layer false realities over truth, a perfect metaphor for her fractured identity and her life of necessary deceptions.
Queen Sulphur: A Found Family Forged in Fire
The heart of Queen of Faces by Petra Lord beats strongest when Ana assembles her mercenary crew: Queen Sulphur. Weston Brown, insufferably handsome with his star-woven body and paper-slicing Folding Edge Codex, begins as Ana’s foil—wealthy, talented, everything she’s not. Their banter crackles with tension that slowly transforms into something deeper and more complex as they learn to trust each other with their literal bodies during swaps. Nima Qasemi operates two bodies simultaneously through their Copycat Codex, a nonbinary dual-consciousness that defies conventional understanding of self. Korin, the lone Humdrum among them, inhabits his grandmother’s elderly body after rescuing from torture, representing resilience despite having no magic at all.
These relationships develop through shared trauma and impossible missions. When they infiltrate Lyna Wethers’s yacht party to expose a corrupt ex-spy, when they face down Adam Weaver’s white-hot Palefire dragons, when they discover Commonplace’s hidden stronghold beneath the Flooded District—each mission strips away pretense until only raw honesty remains. Lord excels at these action sequences, choreographing magic battles with cinematic precision while never losing sight of emotional stakes. The intimacy of body-swapping—feeling another’s essence, experiencing their memories and emotions—becomes both tactical advantage and profound vulnerability.
The Shadow of the Black Wraith
Khaiovhe looms over the narrative like smoke given form. The Black Wraith, blamed for burning Shenti cities and massacring fleets during the recent war, leads Commonplace’s revolution against Paragon’s elitism. But as Ana draws closer to her target, the simple villain-hero binary collapses. Sophie—Khaiovhe’s true name—emerges as something far more tragic and complex than the monster from propaganda posters. Her story, revealed in alternating perspectives, exposes the rot at Paragon’s foundation: professors who torture, a system that elevates the wealthy while discarding the desperate, and secrets buried in entrance exams that no one remembers taking.
The moral ambiguity Lord weaves throughout Queen of Faces by Petra Lord never feels forced. Ana herself becomes complicit in violence, making choices that haunt her—killing in self-defense, manipulating innocents with illusions, working for a headmaster whose motivations remain frustratingly opaque. The book asks uncomfortable questions: What separates revolutionaries from terrorists? Can stolen bodies ever truly be justice? Who deserves magic, and who decides?
Technical Brilliance and Narrative Stumbles
Lord’s prose walks a tightrope between lyrical and brutal. Sentences like “Most caterpillars die in the cocoon” recur as mantras throughout Ana’s darkest moments, while descriptions of rotting flesh and magical combat viscerally assault the senses. The first-person narration from Ana’s perspective captures her sardonic humor (“I’d rather die than be caught dead in that outfit”) alongside genuine terror and longing.
However, the pacing occasionally stumbles under the weight of its own complexity. The middle section, packed with back-to-back missions for Carriwitch, can feel repetitive despite escalating stakes. Some secondary characters—particularly fellow Paragon students—remain frustratingly underdeveloped, existing primarily to populate the academy rather than drive plot or theme. The romance between Ana and Wes, while genuinely earned through shared vulnerability, sometimes competes for attention with the larger conspiracy plotlines, leaving both threads feeling slightly undernourished.
The magic system, for all its creativity, occasionally suffers from inconsistent rules. Rainbow Veil’s limitations shift based on plot necessity rather than established parameters, and the mechanics of body swapping—especially regarding the mysterious tracer spell Adam places on Ana—could benefit from clearer explanation. These aren’t fatal flaws, but they occasionally pull readers out of immersion to puzzle over logistics.
Themes That Cut Deep
What elevates this debut beyond competent dark fantasy is its unflinching engagement with identity and embodiment. Ana’s dysphoria—existing in a body that feels fundamentally wrong—resonates as both literal plot device and potent metaphor. Her journey isn’t simply about acquiring a “better” body but learning to survive, and eventually thrive, regardless of her container. The moment she cuts Sophie’s long black hair after taking her star-woven body, making it her own rather than simply wearing another’s face, represents genuine character growth.
The class commentary cuts with equal sharpness. Paragon hoards magical education, creating artificial scarcity that benefits the elite while condemning failures like Ana to lives of desperation. Commonplace’s revolution, for all its violence, asks whether burning an unjust system might be the only path to justice. Lord doesn’t provide easy answers, instead forcing readers to sit with uncomfortable truths about privilege, access, and the costs of maintaining order.
The Verdict: A Flawed Gemstone
Queen of Faces by Petra Lord announces a major new voice in dark young adult fantasy. Despite pacing issues and occasional worldbuilding inconsistencies, the emotional core remains devastatingly effective. Ana Gage joins the pantheon of unforgettable protagonists—desperate, clever, morally complex, and utterly human despite (or because of) her inhuman circumstances. The found family dynamics, the visceral body horror, and the mounting conspiracies promise an explosive continuation in future series installments.
This isn’t comfort reading. Lord pulls no punches with violence, death, and the psychological toll of survival. But for readers craving fantasy that grapples with real pain, systemic injustice, and the radical act of claiming space in a world designed to erase you, this debut delivers with both hands.
The water rises in Caimor. The caterpillar struggles in its cocoon. And Anabelle Gage refuses to die quietly.
For Readers Who Loved:
- The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang – Complex moral protagonists in brutal magical academies
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – Dark humor, necromantic body horror, and queer found families
- Vicious by V.E. Schwab – Morally grey characters with unique powers
- A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik – Survival-focused magic school with high stakes
- Babel by R.F. Kuang – Academia as site of exploitation and resistance