“By now, I’m sure many of you have tried to find the devil at a hotel bar, and I probably should have said this before: Be very careful. Hollywood was not built on dreams, it was built on favors from the devil, and the devil does not handle it well when those favors aren’t paid back.”
page 36, Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about Alchemy of Secrets through a list of anticipated fantasy releases for October 2025 from the booktuber Elliot Brooks. What caught my eye was the fact that Stephanie Garber was a YA fantasy author making their adult fantasy debut with this book. As I mentioned in my review of To Shape a Dragon’s Breath I had stopped reading YA fantasy as it was not the genre for me.
I had not read Stephanie Garber’s previous YA fantasy books so I was not familiar with her writing before this. An author making the transition into adult fantasy was intriguing to me. Additionally the premise of Alchemy of Secrets sounded interesting enough for me to put a hold for it at the library. The hold arrive this past weekend.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
The Book
Alchemy of Secrets is a magical realist fantasy thriller with light touches of urban fantasy. The first thing I noticed about this book is that it moves fast. Storygraph has this book tagged as “fast-paced” and that is very much accurate. This is one of those books where I found myself wanting the book to actually slow down a little bit and explore these characters and scenes some more.
The second thing I noticed that is the author loves similes/analogies a little too much and I found numerous instances within the first quarter of the book where I get sentences like the following.
the rumor stuck in your head like a song, it plagued you like an unsolved riddle.
page 1
You’re starry-eyed and optimistic, an overexposed picture made of too much light
page 2
he was a little too perfect, like an email without a typo or an airbrushed picture that needed one wrinkle
page 5
I think if you are using an “or” in your simile you are doing a little too much. Have confidence in your reader to understand the meaning of your simile with the first comparison. And maybe, just maybe similes/analogies will be more effective if they are used sparingly. I don’t usually comment on this aspect of someone’s writing style but it was so glaringly obvious that I couldn’t ignore it.
Also to paraphrase Kendrick Lamar, some things like the below quote are just cringeworthy and it ain’t even gotta be deep I guess.
He wanted a date who would look good in an Instagram photograph, not one who could end up on Dating Hell Reddit.
page 9
So the book was not off to a good start, and it doesn’t get much better from there. I didn’t like any of the characters & the plot felt like it was a disparate series of events contrived to make sure the protagonist Holland St James made it through. The descriptor I am looking for is “a jumbled mess” or “incoherent”. It felt like series of vignettes with the occasional glimpses into the magical fantasy world before we got whisked away to the next scene.
There was no sense of flow to the whole affair. I don’t mind a fast-paced book, but this book is both fast-paced and lacking in flow which meant at no point did I feel like I had a solid grip on the narrative. Slippery like an eel. That is why I think, the book could have benefited from slowing the pace and exploring its characters and world more.
One of the only good things I can say about this book is at 352 pages it is a mercifully short and quick read. The other is that there are glimpses of a very interesting world of magic being portrayed in this book that I would like to see another book borrow from and flesh out into a better book. An urban fantasy set in LA with the use of local myths and folklore is a fantastic premise that deserves a better book than this.
Conclusions
Alchemy of Secrets was decidedly a below average reading experience for me. I have read a lot of excellent fantasy this year so my bar for what I consider to be “average” or “good” has been raised. Forgettable characters with a plot that moves too fast and fantastical elements that aren’t given the time they need means that by the end of it I was left with a big sense of “well that was a book I read”.
This book at least gets “it was not worse than Heavenly Tyrant” award. So there’s that. I don’t think I’ll be returning to Stephanie Garber’s work in the future unless I hear rave reviews about whatever she writes next.
That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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