Ruko had always wondered how his mother kept her face so blank. Now he understood. You had to open a hole inside yourself and let everything drain through it. The horror, the grief, the guilt. The love. Most of all, the love. Let it drain away until there was no feeling left.
Chapter Three, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
Table of Contents
Preamble
I have been hearing about The Raven Scholar since May of 2025 from various folks, almost all the booktubers I follow have talked about the book – caricanread, Tori Morrow, Elliot Brooks, lexi aka newlynova. The book has been in my to-be-read pile since cari first mentioned it.
Lexi was the one who most recently talked about it in her most recent book wrap up and she spoke very positively of it, giving it five stars. As a lovely bit of coincidence, I had picked up a heavily discounted ebook copy of the the book in September and as such it was the book that I was planning on reading after Bury Your Bones in the Midnight Soil.
So here we are, let’s talk about this book.
The Book
Let’s start with the basics. The Raven Scholar is an epic fantasy story set in the empire of Orrun with a high stakes competition for who will become the next emperor. Yes, there is a map at the beginning of the book. There is also palace intrigue and a murder mystery. There is also the Raven and they are magnificent.
The story is mostly told from the perspective of Neema Kraa, the emperor’s High Scholar and this book does the thing that I loved about Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett – fictional footnotes. Like with the main character in that book, Neema is a scholar and academic and her sections often have footnotes citing some bit of lore from the fantasy world this book is in.
That brings me to one of my favourite aspects of this book. Lore. There is so much lore in this book and all of it feels interesting in a way that I don’t think I have experienced in a epic fantasy novel in a long time. The author quite shrewdly avoids the trap of lore dumping, the lore is doled out at the appropriate times in the appropriate amounts to flesh out the world and its characters.
And there are so many characters. Neema is the star of the show but there is a whole lot of side characters in this book and this book does a good job of making all these characters have distinct and interesting personalities of their own. The distinctness of the characters also makes it so that I never got confused as to who’s who and that is quite the feat in a book with this many characters in it. As far as side characters go, Cain is a favourite of mine, he’s just a delight.
Neema is a character I fell in love with. She is a huge nerd more at home in the palace library than being thrust into a cutthroat competition and being asked to solve the murder of one of the competitors. All while juggling palace intrigue and a competition that she is not at all ready for. I loved the way Neema’s character slowly starts to get to grips with her reality and uses the tools at her disposal to participate in the various trials and investigate the murder mystery.
This is one of those books where it is difficult to talk about why I loved the plot of this book without spoiling major story events. So I’ll just say that I was deeply invested in the competition and in the murder mystery all the way through. I read this book in three days and every time I stopped I just wanted to get back into the book to be in the world and see what happens.
The mystery actually remained mysterious until the revelations, I didn’t figure them out in advance. I also didn’t see any of the twists coming, and as someone who enjoys a good mystery I was delighted whenever a twist came my way. At several points during my reading I audibly gasped “oh my fucking god” and “what the fuck” at certain plot reveals.
Antonia Hodgson used to write historical mystery novels before this and their skills at writing a good mystery are very much apparent in this book. To make a comparison to another fantasy-mystery book I’ve read, I enjoyed this more than I did The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.
I just had so much fun reading this book. It has been a long while since I’ve read a book where the sheer experience of ingesting the characters, the world, the plot was so much fun. The book was a wild ride all the way through and I enjoyed every bit of said ride. The way all the discrete elements of the book come together is just really really really good.
Conclusions
This book has just the right mix of fantasy worldbuilding, interesting characters, and a plot that had me at the edge of my seat the whole way through. The Raven Scholar is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, it is certainly the best epic fantasy novel I’ve read this year, surpassing the fantastic novels in the Daevabad trilogy. So it is another addition to my books of the year list for 2025. This is part of the Eternal Path Trilogy and I cannot wait for the sequel to come out. I will be preordering that book as soon as preorders are available.
This book has been picking up in popularity within book communities since it came out and I think it is well deserved. If you are a fantasy reader, I think this is a book you should check out. It is magnificent.
That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.
Thank you for reading this blog post. Please consider supporting my writing work directly through Stripe or Patreon. Additionally, please share this post on your socials and/or with your friends. It really helps! If you have any thoughts/feedback/thoughtful criticism to share, feel free to use the handy contact me page to send that to me.