Innamorata by Ava Reid

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

(Please check trigger warnings before going into this book! It is Dark!)

Blurb:

A visionary and atmospheric gothic fantasy about necromancy, vengeance, and soul-consuming love, the first in a duology from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning and Lady Macbeth

Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth, and seven noble houses ruled by the arcane secrets of necromancy.

A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic.

But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members: beautiful Marozia, the heiress to the House, and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes.

Though she has not spoken a word in seven years, Agnes is the true carrier of the House’s legacy. And she has her orders. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family’s fallen honor. She must arrange the betrothal of her beloved cousin Marozia to Liuprand, heir to the conqueror’s throne, for access to the forbidden library in his grotesquely grand castle.

Revenge burns in Agnes’s heart but so do stranger passions—and it is Liuprand, the golden prince, who speaks to her soul. This passion is as treasonous as it is powerful, poisoning the kingdom’s roots and threatening to tear the already shattered realm in two.

For Agnes’s final order is the gravest: She must not fall in love.

My Review: 

I was desperate for something that would shake me awake, something sharp, strange, and a little dangerous. This book didn’t just deliver. It grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go.

I don’t think I’ve ever finished a novel feeling so conflicted. On one hand, it’s undeniably brilliant, meticulously crafted, deliberate, almost cruel in how carefully it unfolds. On the other hand, it’s deeply, profoundly unsettling. The kind of story that lingers in the corner of your vision long after you’ve closed the cover.

This book is dark. Not the trendy, aesthetic kind of dark, I mean suffocating, bone-deep darkness. It’s gory. It’s grotesque. It revels in its sharp edges. It wants you uncomfortable. It wants you squirming. It wants to burrow beneath your skin and make a home there. And maddeningly… it succeeds.

And yet, I loved it.

A huge part of that is Ava Reid’s writing. Her prose is hauntingly beautiful, almost hypnotic. She has this uncanny ability to trap you inside a single moment, a flicker of candlelight, a breath held too long, the metallic scent of blood, and make it feel monumental. All the while, she’s quietly, mercilessly building the larger narrative brick by brick. You don’t even realize how intricately it’s been constructed until the final pieces lock into place, and when they do, it’s devastating.

The political tension coils tighter and tighter with every chapter. Betrayal cuts deep. Revenge simmers. Power shifts like a blade pressed to the throat. It carries echoes of House of the Dragon, that same brutal dance of ambition and inheritance, but with an even darker, more intimate thread of necromancy woven through it. It feels ancient and rotting and alive all at once.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely.

But not lightly.

This isn’t a comfort read. It isn’t safe. It will make you uneasy. It may even make you angry. But if you crave gothic horror steeped in blood and politics, if you want something that unsettles you as much as it mesmerizes you, this story will consume you.

Just, please, check the content warnings first.