Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Ink Blood Sister Scribe,” Törzs, Emma. New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, [2023].

Content Warnings:  Blood, Death of a Parent, Gun Violence, Body Horror

Books can be magic.  Magic can be dangerous.  Esther and Joanna Kalotay have known this all their lives, growing up above their father’s hidden collection of magical books.  Joanna can hear these mystical tomes.  Esther is not affected by any of the magic within them.  Their father protects these books obsessively after Esther’s mother was killed by people trying to find them.

Then Joanna comes home to find her father dead, his blood soaking into a book that is not part of the family’s collection.  Frantically, she calls out to her mother, Esther’s stepmother, for help, but Cecily cannot say anything.  Esther will not come home.  Despite this, however, Abe Kalotay’s death plunges the whole family into a rollercoaster of magical spells, schemes, and scrapes that follow Esther and Joanna around the globe before pulling them both back home.  There they must confront their family, their future, and what they will choose to do with the magic that they have.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe is clearly Emma Törzs’s debut novel.  The book starts out slowly with atmospheric, if sometimes repetitive, writing from both Joanna and Esther’s points of view.  Then, a fourth of the way through the novel, Törz adds a third point-of-view character to the story and makes the plot take off.  Ink Blood Sister Scribe becomes as much of a thriller as a contemporary fantasy as you try to puzzle out the secrets of magic, who the characters can trust, and how everything connects in this twisted web of intrigue and blood.

This story’s strength lies in its main characters.  Esther, Joanna, and their companions are complex yet lovable.  You feel their conflict about their parents and guardians with them, mixing anger with love and understanding with hate.  The family struggles in Ink Blood Sister Scribe keep the book grounded in reality, despite the book’s magical leanings.  The novel’s trust in chosen family keeps the novel feeling hopeful, despite how dark the story gets.

While Ink Blood Sister Scribe ends a bit too neatly for my tastes, with a stereotypically evil villain bringing the characters together beyond their other messy connections, the book is a rampantly engaging exploration of family, power, magic, and the dangerous line between preservation and control.  The book will appeal to fans of family-centered contemporary fantasy like The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd or The Villa by Rachel Hawkins.  I love the way that it ended, turning the page so another story could begin.

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Librarian at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.