Antonia Hodgson is an author who is new to the Hugo Awards, and thus new to me; in fact, my understanding is that she's new to sf&f altogether, her previous work all being (I believe) historical mysteries. I'm extremely appreciative of this; some years, it feel like the finalists for Best Novel are all by writers you've come to expect in series you've come to grow used to. You wouldn't know she's new to the genre, though; The Raven Scholar has some excellent craft supporting it, both in terms of prose and how the world is unspooled for the reader.
The Raven Scholar: Book One of the Eternal Path Trilogy |
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Originally published: 2025 Acquired: May 2026 Read: June 2026 |
This is an immersive secondary world fantasy, the kind of thing that can demand a lot of work from a reader, but Hodgson does a good job supporting that work. I appreciated how well the story was told; I think many writers of immersive fantasy in particular don't really see the narrator as a character worth thinking about, except as a supposedly transparent lens into the third-person thoughts of your protagonists. But Hodgson's narrator has personality and verve. Exactly where its perspective comes from is slowly revealed across the course of the book in a way I found interesting. The novel even seems to be some kind of in-universe document, as it contains footnotes and commentary. (Exactly where this text originates from wasn't clear to me, though I suppose there are two more books to go.)
Me being me, I'm of course constantly thinking about everything I read in terms of its genre: where is it positioned relative to other constituents of the field? I read a comment on Reddit that even though none of the characters were young adults, the book felt YA, and I was like, "Hm, why would that be?" I don't know that I agree that I felt YA, but I could see how someone else would feel that way. And I decided that it was that it's all a bit Harry Potter / Hunger Games, in two ways. First, there's that classic YA trope, that the entire society can be divided into x number of groups. This isn't always a YA thing, but we commonly see it in YA: the four houses in Harry Potter are the most obvious example. Here, the Empire is divided into eight different orders: the Ravens of the title are the scholars, the Foxes are the spies and assassins, and so on. (I, obviously, would be an Ox.) Has any real society ever broken down so neatly? There are exactly eight kinds of people!
The other very YA thing is that there's a "trial" of some kind. The Empire chooses its leader through a competition, where each of the eight orders fields a representative; they compete in both combat- and noncombat-based events across the course of a week. It all felt a bit "Triwizard Tournament" to me, especially the aspect that even though there's been a murder, the trials must still go ahead, and so the main character has to investigate the murder and participate in the trials, which is the kind of stuff I feel like Dumbledore is always inexplicably making Harry Potter do. Yes, someone's been murdered, but we can't postpone our games, so you must compete in them and be a detective!
I told a friend this, and she said it was weird that I specifically associated it with Harry Potter, because she says it's basically ubiquitous across contemporary fantasy. I would assume this mostly people who grew up on Harry Potter and thus absorbed it into their conception of how the genre works—though perhaps the even bigger influence here is Divergent, which features both a set of groups and a big competition. As my friend said, it "really cemented the 'classified groups' thing beyond the school story context." I was thus surprised to discover that author Antonia Hodgson is about ten years older than me; she is not part of the Harry Potter generation, surprisingly enough, and so I wouldn't think would have this in her default conception of how fantasy realms operate. But here it is, and I think it's why the redditor in question found The Raven Scholar to be on the YA end, because it's coming from a YA fantasy conception of how the universe works.
I find the the "people classify themselves" thing a little silly, but tolerable; I do find the system of trials for choosing a leader unbelievable, especially when we find out it's been a place for over a thousand years. Does any institution function so consistently for so long? Especially one this weird?
Anyway, if you're able to accept all of this (and I was), it's a highly enjoyable read. Great characters, decent jokes, good twists, strong prose. Though over six hundred pages is probably honestly more than any book not by George Eliot needs to be. I'm not much of a fantasy person, but this solidly scratches my itch of what I enjoy in the genre when I do read it.
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