Let’s start with what The Raven Scholar is not.

• It is not a murder mystery, though our chief character is tasked with investigating a murder.
• It is not a tournament tale, though our main characters compete in a tournament.
• It is not a coming-of-age story, despite the introduction of a sixteen-year-old girl on the cusp of adulthood facing a decision that will set her on the path to the rest of her life.
• It is not Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel. [1]
• It is not a revenge story, though one character plots the death of another who greatly harmed them in the past.
• It is not a redemption story, though characters make horrible decisions early in their lives, and have a chance to make different choices years later.
• It is not a Resist the Caste novel, though characters do sort themselves into castes.

[1] despite the footnotes

Or, perhaps to be more accurate, The Raven Scholar is not solely or simply these things. Not “solely,” because it somehow is all of them, and even a few more, without making the novel feel overstuffed (the nearly 700-page length helps with that). Not “simply,” because just when you think the story has settled into the overly familiar grooves of one of the above-listed tropes, constrained and contained so everything is now dully predictable, it escapes its boundaries, clambering over walls, jumping out windows, or morphing into yet another type of story altogether. Honestly, it probably shouldn’t work anywhere nearly as well as it does, and it’s a testament to Antonia Hodgson’s craft that not only does it work but does so in wonderfully stimulating and entertaining fashion.

The novel is set in the empire of Orrun, whose people generally worship the eight Guardians (Raven, Fox, Tiger, Ox, Hound, Bear, Monkey, and Dragon), though not all are believers. At age sixteen they can if they wish choose to “affiliate” as a scholar with a particular Guardian, based on how well their own personality traits and work preferences mesh with a Guardian’s attributes. A relatively brief prologue introduces us to Yana and Ruko Valit, whose father, Andren—known as the Great Traitor—was executed eight years earlier for leading a rebellion against the current emperor, Bersun. We also meet a low-level Raven scholar, Neema Kraa, and her best friend, Cain.

We then jump ahead eight years to the novel’s present. Neema is now High Scholar in service to Emperor Bersun, who is required by law to step down after twenty-four years of rule. As is tradition, his successor will be the winner of a series of trials, with a single contender sent by each of the Guardian Monasteries. (The Dragon contestant—for reasons—participates in the trials but does not vie for the throne.) When the Raven contender is murdered, Neema is not only tasked with investigating the crime but also has to take the victim’s place in the trials, despite her lack of preparation or training. Her investigation, as often occurs in these situations, ripples outward from the original crime and uncovers secrets that endanger not only herself but also the empire.

So how/why does it all work? It begins with our main character, Neema. Hodgson gives her the kind of backstory that tends to endear a character to an audience. She is a member of the lower class who rose in unprecedented fashion to the position of High Scholar thanks, mostly (and more on that later), to her intelligence and work ethic. Socially awkward and of a disadvantaged background, she was shunned and bullied in school by those with more wealth, power, and contacts—and even now, in her exalted position, gets no respect from her colleagues. Worse, she has no friends, a harsh reality that eats away at her: “It is one thing to admit to being feared, or hated. Quite another to admit that you are unloved, and lonely, and that it is taking all your strength to hide it.”

Neema’s endearing struggles go on. Her scholarly papers go mostly unread, something she acknowledges with more than a little self-deprecation: “At last, after months of delay, she could focus on her latest monograph: Ketuan Prison Ballads of the Seventh Century. The world, she knew, held its breath for publication.” She lost her best (and only) friend and lover, Cain, thanks to a long-ago argument and now is forced into close contact with him again. And she’s put in not just one but two impossible situations: find a murderer within four days and compete in the succession tournament despite no preparation.

All of this, as noted, pre-conditions the reader to root for Neema, and Hodgson could have left it at that. Instead, she negates some of that built-in sympathy by also making Neema a flawed character, one all the richer for it. Neema has, for instance, a complete inability to let even the most minor of errors slide by uncommented upon, compulsively correcting everyone’s mistakes. While often played effectively for laughs, this habit also goes a long way toward explaining her lack of friends. She reminds me quite a bit of Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News (1987), who, when her boss comments sarcastically that “[i]t must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” replies, “No, it’s awful.”

Far worse, though, is the morally questionable choice she makes early on, when she is still a lowly Junior Archivist. Speaking in general terms so as to avoid spoilers, Neema is tasked by the emperor to perform a simple bureaucratic function, but one that will enable someone’s horrible suffering as part of an unjust and disproportionate punishment. Cain tries to talk her out of it, but Neema is tired of constantly watching those less deserving being promoted over her:

“If I don’t write it, someone else will.”

“So let them, Neema …”

“This is a big chance for me, Cain. A meeting with the emperor.”

“Well don’t trip on [their] corpse in the rush over,” Cain snapped. … “There’s a line, Neema. A thick, black line. Once you cross it …”

Cain’s arguments are to no avail, though, and after he leaves, Neema runs through a litany of rationalizations for her complicity:

The emperor was a good man [… The subject of the Order] would suffer and die whether Neema wrote the Order or not […] She had been commanded by her emperor […] Cain had done far worse.

These rationalizations are made all the more appalling to the reader because they follow immediately upon Neema imagining in vivid detail the horrors that will be visited upon the subject of the Order. She knows exactly what she is complicit in. And though it is this that first places her in the emperor’s path—and thus on the way to achieving her position as High Scholar—this decision will haunt her the rest of her days: “She could not be forgiven, she could not forgive herself … There was no space for redemption, not for anyone.” (Other aspects of her past also cast Neema in a somewhat different light, but I won’t detail them here, again to avoid spoilers.)

Meanwhile, other characters are also well drawn, if not quite as deeply. Cain, Neema’s trickster friend (a Fox to her Raven), could have simply been the roguish comic relief and the “will-they-won’t-they” romance option, but he too has layers to him. His seeming insouciance, for instance, belies the fact that he is the contestant selected by the Fox monastery to vie for the throne—which also, of course, puts him in direct competition with Neema. Or would if she had any belief she could actually win the tournament.

The emperor is also a complex figure, ruthless and quick to anger but also the man who put in place the social reforms that opened up the monasteries to those like Neema from the lower classes (one reason she feels a loyalty to him). Meanwhile, Ruko, the Bear contestant whom we meet as a young boy in the prologue, could, somewhat similarly to Cain, have been a stock character—in his case, the cold, brutal, laser-focused warrior. And for much of the novel that is what he seems to be, until like the others he is revealed to be something more. Finally, there is our omniscient narrator—at first a talking book, which later breaks free of that form to take the shape of a wonderfully (his word, here) “magnificent” bird—whose identity is a pleasant surprise and whose voice is a boisterous joy, adding both a laugh-out-loud bit of self-important humor and a surprisingly moving bit of pathos. He may be my favorite bird character since Kaw in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series.

With regard to plot, the murder mystery is nicely twisty and turny and, in the best way of such things, full of revelations that are both surprising and in hindsight inevitable, thanks to the author’s deftness in seeding the clues. This central mystery drives the plot but does not dominate it. The same can be said of the tournament, which both provides a concrete structure (each day a different segment) and a ticking-clock urgency. The competition itself is tense throughout and comes with some built in life-or-death stakes; but, rather than simply being a series of brutal fights (there are those), the trials—each tied to that Guardian’s traits—are much more varied than we typically see in this trope. The Monkey trial, for instance, is a performance rather than a fight, and these non-combat segments are not only more interesting but also frequently used as a means of characterization, allowing the competition to serve more than a simple plot purpose.

This varied format, combined with the murder mystery element, allows for a nice balance between physical action, intellectual gamesmanship, and character introspection. Along with a good helping of humor throughout, the book is never bogged down—even though it takes its time (the murder, for instance, doesn’t take place until a quarter of the way in). I happily zipped through it in two reading sessions and then, when so much time had passed between that reading and the point I could sit down to write this review, I did so again. The book feels nothing like its near-700 pages.

Much of this can be credited to the worldbuilding, which is often richly vivid. The mythos of the Guardians is fascinating, as are the characters of individual Guardians. We’re clued in early on that, despite their group name “Guardians,” the beings are far from entirely benign. When Yana is considering what Guardian she might affiliate with, her father tells her, “The Monkey can be playful, but it is still a creature of the wild. Today, it dances at your side. Tomorrow it may jump on your back, and sink its teeth in your throat. … Every Guardian has its shadow side.” This is something we see in truly chilling fashion at various points in the story.

I also appreciate the way in which Hodgson has crafted her novel’s affiliation system. The dividing of people into the Guardian groups could have been shallow, formulaic, and problematic in a number of ways (see, for example, the group sorting in the Divergent series [2011-14] or the racialized traits in the Belgariad series [1982-84]). But Hodgson executes the concept in fresh and effective ways. One, the grouping is not simply arbitrary or built on an abstraction but is concretely founded on actual beings who display those same traits and whom we see (to varying extents) as actual characters in the book. Two, not everyone chooses; affiliation is an option that nearly all in this culture take, but is not required or given, and in fact we meet one character who blithely announces about her region of the empire, “we don’t bother with that.” Three, people don’t self-segregate into their groups save those who choose to become part of the temple system. They tend to work mostly with each other (for instance, Ravens lean toward being scholars, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats; Foxes spies and assassins; Monkeys creative artists), but they also work across their affiliations and live and interact with each other with no real regard for the Guardian with which a given person has affiliated. Nobody is coerced into affiliating, no one gets tested, nobody evinces any built-in hostility save the usual ways morning people annoy night owls or the chaotic annoy the organized. It’s not presented as any sort of free-will-crushing dystopia, and everyone seems pretty content.

More ominous is the prophecy associated with the Guardians that “[s]even times have the Guardians saved Orrun. The next time they Return, they will destroy it.” Throughout, Hodgson creates a strong sense of history for this world, with numerous references to past events and personages: an unknown ancient cataclysm, a famously cruel Empress gifted a vision that saw her transform herself and her nation, a pirate turned monk, a terrible poet, an awful suicide, a cursed blade, and more. These allusions often come via breaks in the main narrative, either in the form of footnotes (roughly a dozen scattered throughout) or stories within stories. Individually, each footnote and story were so well done that I found myself wanting more of them. As a group, though, the footnotes felt a bit unbalanced: It is as if they peter out, with the first ten of thirteen all coming within the first 15 percent of the book. The digressive stories also disappear as the novel goes on, though given their length I can understand the author not wanting to interrupt an accelerating narrative with additional stories.

The novel certainly has its thinner aspects, then—in particular in its treatment of the world’s geography and culture. The first is an unavoidable element of the story itself, all of which takes place on the Imperial Island—because that is where the seat of government is and where the tournament takes place. We get brief references to a few mainland areas, and even briefer mention of areas beyond the empire’s borders, and there is a map at the start with some more detail. But details remain scant. The empire is a huge area, “vast and intimidating,” and it takes months to cross, but aside from a few throwaway lines, there was little sense of what lies elsewhere on the map and more importantly how the various regions and their societies differed from one another. That said, it’s clear the sequel will show us more of the empire, so there’s a good chance we’ll get a better sense of those differences then.

It’s not as if the novel as we have it doesn’t cover sufficient ground. Thematically, Hodgson explores a number of topics. Class is an obvious one, with Neema, as noted, one of the few to rise out of the lower classes into a position of power—“The first Commoner of Scartown in history to secure a place at the second palace”—and facing discrimination and isolation each step of the way. There’s also an ongoing tension between those who appreciate the reforms brought about relatively recently by the emperor and those who wish to return to the days in which blood rather than merit determined one’s place in society.

Other topics Hodgson delves into include justice versus vengeance, remorse and redemption, complicity, ambition, and the need to belong. But to detail those would entail spoiling too many of the twists in the book, so I’ll simply say that each is handled in deft, nuanced fashion, eschewing simple answers or platitudes. And if those subjects sound weighty, you’ll be happy to know that the book is leavened throughout by that wonderfully wry sense of humor that expresses itself in all sorts of settings: banter between characters, the narrator’s dry wit, interior monologue, situational humor, and more. Here, for instance, is our narrator relating one conversation:

“Neema’s investigating Gaida’s murder. Katsan’s furious,” Tala summarised.

“I’m not furious,” Katsan said, furious.

Elsewhere, when Neema asks Gaida, who is doing a poetry recital, “Was that Poldren the Bleak you were quoting, back there?”, the poet’s name is footnoted by our omniscient narrator with the text: “Notoriously terrible fifth-century poet.”

For all this lightness of touch, The Raven Scholar has a grand climactic scene full of tense stand-offs, world-shaking action, betrayals, and rescues. It resolves a number of plot threads, answers the questions surrounding the murder mystery, and finds a winner for the succession tournament, even as it leaves major plot points unresolved and sets our characters on the path to showing us the wider world of the empire in book two. Across its whole length, this is a richly nuanced novel which will both exhilarate readers and break their hearts. I started this review by listing what the book was not: a murder mystery, a coming-of-age story, a revenge tale (then I admittedly cheated and said it was all of those). But if asked what the novel is, above all else I’d say The Raven Scholar is: surprising.

This novel surprises with how it employs all those so-familiar plotlines. It surprises with its prickly choice of character. With its wonderful revelation of narrator. It surprises with its length—700+ pages that you’d swear were only 400 or so. It surprises with its dry humor and warm heart. It surprises with how many times and ways it surprises. (Seriously. I think this book surprised me more than the past several years of reading/viewing experiences.) And honestly, by midway through and beyond, I just kept being surprised by how much I was enjoying it. This novel felt like how I imagine it would feel if I could, as I’ve so often wished, go back and read my favorite books for the first time again. Which I know on the surface makes no sense, since this obviously was my first time reading this book. But that’s the strange (and surprising) vibe it gave me; that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.