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How the Healer Orphaned Herself
Before the Healer Joined the Hero's Party, Book 1
by A.M. Ferrer
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Pub Date 25 Jun 2024 | Archive Date 1 Aug 2024
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Description
This isn’t a tale of how the Hero’s Party thwarted a world-ending catastrophe. It isn’t even his—this story follows his healer instead, long before she joined him in his quest to save the world.
Except she would rather wither in silence than tell you her story.
Alfia, Lady Rinnelise’s lover and rival in healer school, is a bastard healer—a mage born with access to healing spells before even gaining full control of them. The problem? Casting a healing spell more powerful than intended kills with tumors instead.
When a human cadaver from their dissection class triggers Alfia’s persistent night terrors and absences, Rinnelise learns of Alfia’s long-buried past. She didn’t pledge to use her healing abilities to help the innocents of wars and calamities out of duty or selflessness; it is what she traded for lifelong incarceration. Her crime was discovering her immense potential for healing magic by killing someone dear, whom she also came to despise, with an uncontrolled healing spell.
Alfia will never forgive Rinnelise for prying further into that incident. She just wants Rinnelise to help her forget it until she can grit everything down under smiles as she has always done. But as Alfia’s night terrors spur increasingly erratic behaviors that threaten her scholarship and well-being, Rinnelise decides to unearth the events surrounding Alfia’s crime instead, even if it earns her ire, to find out how to thwart her downward spiral before she loses the only place she carved for herself in the world beyond prison.
How the Healer Orphaned Herself is a psychological coming-of-age fantasy within a dark sapphic academy romance for readers seeking character-driven, "outside the hero's journey" stories.
This is a New Adult title. Please be advised.
Available Editions
EDITION | Ebook |
ISBN | 9127919429630 |
PRICE | US$5.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 370 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
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This book has strong sexual content but no graphic scenes and very little violence. The story begins with two little girls who have entered a school for healing magic. It’s definitely a story not so much about magic as it is relationships both familial and romantic. I found it a slow starter because it’s well into the book before we are told the story of one of the main characters. Before that point, I found myself floundering and losing interest. However, after that point the story moved right along and I was glad I had continued.
I received this book as an advanced review copy
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I think this book has a lot of potential! At its core, it explores toxic relationships, guilt, pain, and self-sabotage. The main character goes through some intense trauma and I appreciated how the repression formed as a result of the trauma is portrayed in such a realistic manner. The writing is quite skillful, but the lore is given to the reader in huge info-dumps, which causes the otherwise very interesting worldbuilding to come across as somewhat boring. I wish we had more time to explore the arcs of the supporting cast of characters, since their traits are defined almost entirely by their proximity to royalty and the extent of their magical power, and it causes them to come across very flat. I would’ve liked to learn more about the world (it feels like a D&D campaign!), but since this is setting up to be a series, I suspect we will learn more about that in later books.