If you’ve been on “BookTok” or “BookTube” within the last couple of years, then you’ve definitely heard of Stephanie Garber. She’s a New York Times bestselling author of the “Caraval” and “Once Upon a Broken Heart” trilogies and a personal favorite writer of mine.
Her newest release, which came out on Oct. 7, was her first time publishing a book that takes place outside of the fantasy world of “Caraval.” “Alchemy of Secrets” takes place in present-day Los Angeles, in a world where urban myths are real and Hollywood stars make deals with the devil. Though, like all Stephanie Garber books, not everything is as it seems.
Summary
The story follows Holland St. James, a graduate student in LA, writing her thesis with the help of her old Folklore 517 professor. She believes that all the tragic deaths of movie stars are the result of deals with the devil going unpaid, including that of her parents.
Though she’d never seen any of the myths from her professor’s class in real life, just like all Stephanie Garber main characters, Holland desperately believes in magic. Unlike her other stories, Holland’s is a bit grittier. After learning she will die in less than 24 hours on Halloween night, she witnesses a murder and is kidnapped by a man claiming to know her twin sister.
Sprinkled throughout are short, second-person chapters from the perspective of a student in Holland’s old class, and they act as a way for the reader to hear the stories that Holland already knows without flashbacks or a lengthy recounting, though they disappear around halfway through the book.
My Thoughts
As a disclaimer, I come at this from the perspective of someone who absolutely adores Stephanie Garber’s books. I have special editions of most of her books, and I recommend her stuff like it’s the Gospel. So trust me when I say my criticisms come from a place of love.
To me, it felt like a lot more time and polishing went into the beginning and the end of the book. That’s not to say the middle was bad; it just felt more jumbled, with a lot of mini sidequests that felt pointless to the plot and the characters. A lot of things felt like they should have either been fleshed out more or cut completely.
This book felt very boy-heavy, even for a Stephanie Garber book. There were about four men in this 300-page book that Holland had after her, and the second I started to care even a little about their characters, they were gone.
I was a bit disappointed we didn’t see more from her friends, her sister or really anyone else in her life. It felt like a revolving door of men at times, with her flitting from one to the next after they betray her, which is a common trope in Garber’s books.
With certain scenes, I couldn’t tell if they were intentional callbacks to points in her previous works, or if she just genuinely likes writing those tropes, which I can’t blame her for.
For example, one of the guys she’s with gets shot, and she has to drag him to her house to patch him up, trying to keep him awake, and I got total déjà vu from her book “Once Upon a Broken Heart.” Another one of the characters, Adam Bishop, felt almost like a watered-down version of Jacks, a character from both of her previous trilogies.
The dialogue also felt off at times. Characters would say exactly what they were thinking, which doesn’t sound very natural, but more importantly, is odd for a book by Garber, where the fun of reading it is that we have no clue whether we can trust people or not.
Being able to see through the charade was a common issue for me with this book, because usually I’m completely mystified and just as confused as the characters about what is going on. But this wasn’t even a consistent issue because the last 10 chapters were able to keep me in the dark. It was on par with her previous books in that sense, which is part of the reason why the middle part of the story felt much more scrambled to me.
I felt as though the second-person chapters were underutilized. I kept thinking they would become relevant to the story but they weren’t, and they feel more like the kind of content you’d put into special editions as bonus material.
I cannot stress enough that this was not a bad book. If you like her other stuff, you will like “Alchemy of Secrets” as well, just maybe not quite as much.
I thoroughly enjoyed the urban myths like the Watch Man and the whole “buy the devil a sidecar” thing (without spoiling anything, let’s just say I was underwhelmed with that whole plot twist though). The 1920s/40s vibe mashup was also super fun to read.
Basically, if you’ve read Stephanie Garber before and enjoyed her work, you’ll get a kick out of this book. If you haven’t, you can definitely still enjoy “Alchemy of Secrets,” as it isn’t connected to anything she’s written in the past, but I do not believe it was her best possible work.