When I was growing up, there was no sign around me that non-binary people existed. I was absolutely alone. There was no one in my life, online, in media. All I had was a feeling about myself that I didn’t have a name for. I had to make up a word for it for myself, a word that only I knew. I spent hours in libraries and online, looking for signs of someone, something. I collected partial representations—Shakespeare’s gender play, Freddie’s outfits. It took me years to find another person like me.
Today, I consequently find representation deeply important—especially representation of less well-known lived experiences, such as non-binary genders and polyamory. Infinity Alchemist is one of the books the world has been waiting for: a YA fantasy based around a polyamorous love story. Better still, this love story is between queer and trans characters of colour, and offers one of the best representations of a genderfluid character I’ve read. It is the YA fantasy debut of acclaimed author Kacen Callender, whom you might know from their novels Felix Ever After (2020) or Queen of the Conquered (2019). Their previous novels have won a variety of awards, such as the Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Children’s / Young Adult Literature.
This latest novel’s protagonist, Ash, lives in a world in which alchemical magic is highly regulated and reserved for a privileged few. Having been rejected by the college of his dreams, Ash takes a job as the assistant groundskeeper, and practices magic in secret. (What would you have done if you had a deep need to study magic, but weren’t high-class enough to enter the academy?) He is caught by one of the college’s professors, Ramsay Thorne, a nineteen-year-old rising star in academia. Rather than turn Ash in, Ramsay offers him a dangerous deal: Ash will help the professor find a mythical artifact, The Book of Source, in exchange for magic lessons. Ramsay might even be able to make Ash’s training official, and allow him to use magic legally. Ash agrees, and is swept into a web of intrigue and magic.
As well as a magical quest narrative, the novel is also a story of polyamorous love. Ash, a trans man, and Ramsay, a genderfluid character, slowly develop a love story between themselves. For spoilery reasons, Ramsay and Ash lose contact, and Ash ends up working closely with Ramsay’s ex, Callum. Callum is a cutie-pie, negotiating his position as part of a toxically masculine family. Over time, Ash and Callum develop their own romantic and sexual connection. It is a sweet and convincing love story—a hard thing for a novel to achieve, perhaps, when it has already convinced its readers to root for a different pairing. But when Ash and Callum reconnect with Ramsay, the story does not fall into your run-of-the-mill love triangle, but develops into love between all three.
The few representations of polyamory that we have in mainstream media tend to fall into one of three categories: they are either about jealousy and dubious consent; about sex alone; or they are idealized stories about characters who never experienced an emotion other than joy. Kacen Callender avoids these pitfalls. (That said, there is no lack of spicy scenes.) Infinity Alchemist hits all the rights spots. In its hardcover edition, it seems to tell readers: something good is going to happen to your reading list right now. The audiobook version of the story, meanwhile, is narrated by the wonderful Wes Haas, just the right choice to bring the main character to life. Haas sounds just as I would imagine Ash to sound, and adds emotion beautifully to his words. And the novel’s strongest point, for me, is the sweet development of its characters—and, most importantly, their relationships.
Fan fiction lovers (like me) might recognize the trope of an aristocratic child of privilege, raised to be evil and fighting against their upbringing, coming into contact with a lower-class hothead with a strong sense of justice. Further, while fan fiction can rely on the reader having a lot of information in advance, this novel struggles to provide a lot of background without info-dumping. However, when I say that Infinity Alchemist reads like fan fiction, I mean that it is a sweet love story that holds emotional impact—and that this is one of the scenarios where fan fiction shines.
Callender’s story portrays various emotions: negotiation and insecurity as well as sweetness and love. I wanted to see these themes further developed, but, as they are, they are wonderful to have. I love the way each of the romantic relationships is developed independently of the others and also as part of a system with the rest of them. In particular, Ramsay, the genderfluid character, provides great representation. She is referred to using “she”or “he” based on the last pronouns she used for herself. As a reader, this helped me imagine him moving between genders, as indeed he does. I refer to him here using two sets of pronouns to hopefully continue this experience for review readers.
Ramsay is the child of two privileged parents, who ended up murdering a lot of innocent people in the name of a cause. They were executed, leaving Ramsay to raise herself, hated and lonely. There is another orphaned character, Marlow, an abused, rebellious girl who was taken from an orphanage and trained to become an assassin. She seems to want to be ruthless and need no one, and manages this well … until she does not. She and Ramsey share the drive for toxic independence and the ambiguous relationship with bad parents.
This quest for self-actualisation appears across the novel. Ash, for instance, also shares the experience of having lost a mother, and his father is one of the college’s most celebrated professors. One of Ash’s goals is to confront the father who left his mother to die and Ash to live alone. But it turns out that not all is as Ash was raised to believe. If he repeatedly acts or thinks in irresponsible ways, which makes it harder to root for him, the novel at least explores through his struggles some of the classism common to academia, and the deep injustice behind it. Still, as a struggling grad student myself, I could have done without the image of Ramsay as a non-binary scholar who is just so brilliant and hardworking that, despite adversity, she achieves professorship before the age of nineteen. This somewhat undermines the theme of inequality.
The pacing and balancing of the novel, then, doesn’t quite work. But, as the first book in a series, it leaves a lot of room for interesting character and relationship development. I am curious where the fantasy plot might develop, and to find out more about these characters and their world. The ending leaves all this unclear in a very appealing way. But most of all I am excited by the series’ romantic potential. I would love to read about the trio learning to handle not only adventure but everyday life as a polycule, to read more about questions of insecurity and security, as well as further exploration of compersion—the joy of seeing loved ones together, finding joy in partners’ relationships. These are deeply underexplored topics in mainstream media. It would be wonderful to have the opportunity to read much more about them.
[Editor’s Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Frank Cernik during our annual Kickstarter.]