Merchants of Knowledge and Magic by Erika McCorkle

Calinthe is a Merchant of Knowledge for her Lord Williford, the Demon Lord of Ignorance and she has been sent off on a mission to track down a missing demon. While in the middle of her mission she meets Paivi who is on the run from its seems everyone after turning traitor Calinthe agrees to help her escape from those chasing her but feels there much more to the story than Paivi is letting on and once they return to the Lord of Ignorance's realm she learns that not only is that the case but the missing demon is far more important than she had imagined.

What a freaking ride! From beginning to end this story had me guessing what was going to happen next and it honestly didn't go any direction I thought it was going to end in.

As always we'll start with the characters and omg are there a lot of them, like maybe too many there were more than a few times that I wasn't sure who was talking or which was the Lord of what, or who was a god and why did these Terran guys matter? Ultimately that's what brought this down to four stars instead of five (it's not just in the characters where I found myself confused), there was just a ton of information, I was probably 65% of the way through the book before I could say for certain that I understood who each character was and how they were connected. That being said once I finally did the characters and their motivations made way more sense. Calinthe of course was the most interesting, I have to admit she's the first ACE character I've read so I don't really have a lot of knowledge there to say whether or not she was written well in that respect but the rest of her character I found extremely interesting. She's got a lot going on and I think while she says often that she can't know what's wrong if someone, particularly Zakuro, doesn't tell her but she also seems to assume other people know what she's thinking. It's definitely a blindness of her person that leads to incredibly awkward situations and it does take her a long time to figure this out. I don't think she ever really admits this to herself either, especially with how this ends. Zakuro, I found a bit less interesting, her self-esteem issues while understandable given her mother ended up being extreme to the point of annoying, and while this is in part due to Calinthe's inability to express her emotions, it's difficult to get past just how whiny Zakuro is throughout the book. Williford was by far my favorite character, he is definitely extremely secure in who and what he is which I think was an absolutely perfect way to demonstrate just how immature Calinthe and Zakuro are and makes it much easier to forgive their annoying traits. They are young and trying to do better and that takes time so for all that I said these were annoying traits, when compared to someone who has lived longer well, they are just human traits. 

Now, onto the bad guys. Kamiko and all of Ophida for that matter are just freaking evil. We aren't talking a little evil here either. We are talking utterly depraved, impossible of redemption, and I'd support the death penalty here. The introduction of Kamiko and the noble women of Ophida took a relatively mild fantasy story and turned it into a horror novel in a few sentences. I spent the whole last 25% of the book basically reading just to make sure Calinthe emerges unscathed or as far as unscathed as she could because mentally she's effed forever. 

The world building in this was excellent and to be fair I know it was going to be as that was the number one thing mentioned when this book was recommended. This is a vast world with all sorts of stories within the story, many cultures, and many races. All of which were mostly unique although there were several that had been almost duplicates of their real-world counterparts the Ophida especially are heavily influenced by Japanese culture. What I also found interesting is that there are several very quick passages sometimes just only a sentence that allude to the Demon Lords being human so I'm interested in seeing how that plays out in book two. And while the deep dive world-building was wonderful it was again just a ton of information. Much like the characters, it was difficult to keep track of all of it. Luckily we really end up focusing on the Ophida in the latter portions of the book. 

What this story truly excels at though is its gender representation. Erika mentioned to me on Bluesky that one reader has referred to it as "gender punk" and I think that's an apt description. Thanks to this multitude of races gender is a very solid spectrum. And by solid I mean at its very core it's understood to not be just two things but a multitude of things because of this it is shocking to come across not one but two races that raise on gender over another. And honestly, this could be simply because the MC herself is intersex so our introduction to gender in this world is through her eyes but I don't think so. 

Finally, I really want to discuss the latter half of this book because omg is it an absolute nightmare. Calinthe and Zakuro end up enslaved by the Ophida after Calinthe makes what I believe is a really stupid decision to trust the Ophida, who as an entire society would be the last people on the planet I would trust. And since I've already gone over how absolutely horrendous these people are I'm not going to dive too far into it. What I found to be utterly surprising was how in the end the Gods end up being blamed for the Ophidians continuing to get away with their truly brutal form of slavery. Calinthe mentions several times how she doesn't understand why her god doesn't step in and stop it, which for a highly religious person who has a god who can do that sort of thing that makes sense to a point. What I don't understand is how the rest of the people in the world tolerate it. Which given our current political climate is a very good question to be asking, and maybe that's not McCorkle's point but it's definitely what I took away from this. It's mentioned several times that no one wants to go to war with these people because they have guns but if there was ever a valid reason to take out a country Ophida's treatment of their slaves is at the top of my list. Given Calinthe's declaration at the end of the book, I'm incredibly interested to see how this all plays out. 

Honestly, I expected a maybe cozy little read with some conversations on gender when I started reading this, but what I didn't expect and what was pleasantly surprising was what I got. And I'm not even sure what to call what I got. McCorkle has created one of the most interesting, most complex worlds I have ever read which will make you question your morals and actions in the face of cruel injustices. There is almost a feeling of understanding truly what it means to "be on the right side of history" by the time you get to the end. I can't explain that feeling, not really but it is the only way I can sum it up. I will be reading book two very soon because there are so many things here I am interested in seeing play out.