Series: Eternal Path Trilogy #1
Published by Orbit on April 15, 2025
Genres: Fiction, Fantasy
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From an electrifying new voice in epic fantasy comes The Raven Scholar, a masterfully woven and playfully inventive tale of imperial intrigue, cutthroat competition, and one scholar’s quest to uncover the truth.
Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace, Bersun the Brusque must end his reign. In the dizzying heat of mid-summer, seven contenders compete to replace him. They are exceptional warriors, thinkers, strategists—the best of the best.
Then one of them is murdered.
It falls to Neema Kraa, the emperor’s brilliant, idiosyncratic High Scholar, to find the killer before the trials end. To do so, she must untangle a web of deadly secrets that stretches back generations, all while competing against six warriors with their own dark histories and fierce ambitions. Neema believes she is alone. But we are here to help; all she has to do is let us in.
If she succeeds, she will win the throne. If she fails, death awaits her. But we won’t let that happen.
We are the Raven, and we are magnificent.
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson offers a fresh, entirely new, and extraordinary fantasy world for readers to explore. Entertaining and witty, the novel is filled with imperfect characters, unexpected twists, and meticulously calculated scenes. Each word serves a purpose. Each character has individual motives, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. There is very little about The Raven Scholar that I disliked. Hodgson takes readers on a daring flight through harrowing stakes, life-threatening trials, and clever moments of humor that offer lightning flashes in the palpable darkness.
The book is very slow-going at the beginning, so much so that I almost stopped reading it. This portion, however, is paramount to the rest of the story. As you continue through its pages, everything revolves around the first few chapters of the novel, which occur eight years before most of the plot. This segment helps you understand the narrator (the Raven), the contenders, and the land of Orrun’s history…and it gives a glimpse into the possible future. Fight through the—admittedly beautifully written—sludge. The Raven Scholar is worth the trek. Some of the most beautiful destinations involve the hardest journeys, after all.
What makes The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson so unique is its point of view. The novel features the Raven as the main narrator, one of the eight Guardians of Orrun. Basically, the animal Guardians are Orrun’s gods, which means they are almost omniscient. With the Raven as our narrator, we see into the human characters’ thoughts, sometimes between paragraphs on the same page. This writing style typically gets on my nerves, but not so with The Raven Scholar. The “thought jumping,” too identifies the Raven’s current priorities at any one time—how its eyes shift as the pressures rise.
I wasn’t excited about another book revolving around a trial. I’ve read too many. But The Raven Scholar has so much more in it than that. The characters. The humor. The tension. The world-building. The hint of a romance. And the ending—stupendous. I loved this book. Stellar, brilliant, fantastic. The Raven Scholar deserves all the positive adjectives. Marvelous job, Antonia Hodgson.