Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
An ancient discipline. A secret society. Precocious students. A complicated protagonist. These are some of the ingredients that create the world of Mothsblood, a bold debut by Lynn D. Jung. I don’t read much in the fantasy genre, but I found myself pulled into this world of alchemists and immortals. Larkspur Lee is a candidate to enter Meurdac University on the banks of the Seine in Paris, a school that has been training alchemists forever. Wrought-iron, cobblestones, spires, and cascading arches. Foreboding shadows.
Larkspur Lee is an adept, trained by Victor Goodwin in California. Larkspur is tall, beautiful, unabashedly bisexual and resourceful; she uses her alchemic skills to produce a silver powder called azoth that she sells to make ends meet. While her skills are prodigious, Larkspur has no pedigree — she’s an outsider determined to earn her place in an exclusive society best embodied by Petronelle Flamel, Grand Magistra of Meurdac and Third among the Deathless. We’re told that nearly all of Muerdac’s students “crawled out of the same primordial pool of privilege.” If that sounds like Larkspur might have a chip on her shoulder it’s because she does. And she carries a secret or two.
The novel moves into a higher gear when Flamel is murdered and Muedrac is thrown into turmoil. This brings the Knights — a kind of police unit — onto the scene in the person of Violaine, as well as Victor Goodwin. The mere sound of Victor’s voice makes Larkspur tremble, and it’s clear that the relationship with her former teacher and mentor is tangled, a mixture of love and loathing. Though Victor smells of ink and old parchment, he’s not a diffident scholar in a fine suit. Victor craves power, immortality and lusts after some of his students, none more so than Larkspur, who he groomed. Anyone who stands in Victor’s way will be neutralized. The tension between master and pupil rises. Attracted and repulsed by Victor, fearful of his power, Larkspur is also intrigued by Violaine, the Knight who is formidable on the job and vulnerable off it. Something about Violaine is familiar to Larkspur, stirs a memory she’d rather forget.
Jung rarely puts a foot wrong. She gets the weather right, the atmosphere, and adds just the right amount of detail about alchemy. Will the student outsmart the master? Turns out that there’s more to alchemy than turning dross into gold.
