Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Autistic queer MC, nonbinary queer MC, queer MC, MLM MCs
Published on: 15th September 2026
ISBN: 1250341663
Goodreads

Grey’s Anatomy meets A Deadly Education in this dark academia fantasy from USA Today bestselling author Freya Marske.

At the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, every mage with the healer’s gift has five years to master their power and to prepare for the infamous Grand Exam—a five-day trial whose results will determine their entire future.

The list of exam rules includes:
• You will perform five practical cases.
• Your exam group is chosen at random.
• You pass together, or fail together.

It does not include:
• On the first day, your exam group will find a classmate's dead body in the exam hall.

And as they will soon discover, this particular group all have something to hide... and all have a connection with the dead girl, a brilliant scholar who would have been first in their class.
Five scholars. Five secrets. Five days in which to solve a murder, pass the most important exam of their lives, and uncover a secret larger than all of their own combined. One with the potential to change the world.

Are you ready?
Let’s begin.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~magic defined by geography
~FREE MAGICAL HEALTHCARE FOR ALL
~5 protagonists = 5 flavours of disaster queer
~sometimes arrogant geniuses are as smart as they think
~maybe we should treat healthcare workers better actually

This is going on my Best of the Year list in December. It’s a Crescent Classic. Instant forever-fave. I gritted my teeth through several months of Illumicrate choices I did not care for because their September book is THIS, and there was no way I wasn’t going to get my hands on a special edition of a book I loved THIS MUCH!

This is Freya Marske’s best book yet. If you are a Marske fan, you know what high praise that is – and if you aren’t a Marske fan, then I am here to tell you that THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU ONE!

Just. My GODS, friends, this freaking book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In trying to explain what this book is, I think it does Bodies of Magic (and its potential readers) a disservice to call it Dark Academia. Bodies of Magic is something much harder to pin down; it doesn’t fit neatly into any pigeon-hole. It’s obviously Fantasy, but if you ask me to be any more specific than that, I’m going to have to just flail. Academia is less the focus than it is the context, in my opinion – we don’t see the characters studying, learning, hunting for and obsessed by knowledge in the way that defines Dark Academia for me. The cast has already passed through that – after years of studying, they’re about to (hopefully) graduate; the ‘dark academia’ part of their lives is pretty much done.

Instead… Instead this book is about so much else. There’s so much woven into this standalone – it’s about how we treat healthcare workers, particularly during/in the aftermath of a pandemic; it’s about immigration, the racist responses to it and the pressure on first-generation children to excel; it’s about Gifted Kids in general, and family/societal pressures on them, and the damage those pressures do; nepotism and classism and privilege; the valuing or de-valuing of skilled labour; the societal manipulation possible through standardised education; the domino effect of cutting funding to public services; and, sure, the toxic idiocy of academia. It’s a book for fans of The Pitt, and disaster queers, and themes of mental health and friendship and coming into your own. And yes, there’s a pretty important murder mystery!

The sheer number of facets to this book is ridiculously impressive – but what’s more impressive is that Marske does justice to them all, manages to balance them perfectly, never drops any of the balls she has in the air! Which is why I think this is Marske’s best book yet – a lesser author could never have pulled this off, could never have taken all these threads and made a beautiful, elegant tapestry with them, satisfying and clever and gorgeous. In the hands of almost anyone else, Bodies of Magic would have been a mess, and that it’s not – is the furthest thing from it! – is so, so impressive.

Markse said that ‘This book has been brewing for almost half my life’, and honestly, it shows. So much work and care has gone into this book, and it has completely paid off!

A huge part of what made this book an instant new favourite is the cast (all of whom are queer!): Moyna, the healer who hates healing; Estienne, the scion of a wealthy and well-respected family of elite healers; Jehanne, the equivalent of a scholarship student; Alys, a poorly-performing healer from another rich family; and Clemment, raised in a religion that forbids healing magic entirely. I loved every one of them, and more, Marske made me love them so quickly: it took virtually no time at all before I was obsessed and invested in all the characters with all their different issues and challenges. Mental health issues abound, from Estienne’s low self-worth, to Jehanne’s self-destructive tendencies, to Clemment’s periods of disassociation and borderline self-harming. Alys is autistic, and for the record, as an autistic reader I adored the depiction of her autism – Marske dismisses stereotypes and depicts aspects/symptoms of autism that rarely make it into popular media, especially in the fact that Alys is what some people call ‘high-functioning’, ie able to pass as neurotypical. We almost never get autistic representation like this, and it made me SO HAPPY! And the way the whole cast have different relationships with their magic, healing as a career, the city they live in, religion, their families…it makes for a beautiful kaleidoscope of differences, constantly shifting as we move from PoV to PoV. Reading about these characters…it feels like dancing, like being constantly in motion and passing from partner to partner in a beautiful, rhythmic pattern. It’s not chaotic, because it all fits together the way dancers in the same dance fit together, all their parts forming one dazzling whole that feels so correct.

I don’t know how to put it any better than that.

(And AHHHH, the way the five-PoV structure mimics the way healers work magic together on the same patient!!! IT’S SO FREAKING CLEVER, and such a massively important part of the book, and when you look back on it you see how it laid the groundwork for the climax–!!! GENIUS!!!)

One of the things I loved about Swordcrossed was how economic Marske was with the worldbuilding, how she used relatively few details, but perfectly chosen and placed, to give us a strong sense of this new world she’d made. Bodies of Magic is similar, in that we’re not drowned in info about this setting – but we get more details than we did in Swordcrossed, and all of it is fascinating or beautiful or both! Every chapter opens with a quote from a fictional text that gives us a glimpse of this world’s history and the culture around magical healing, and quite a lot of them are plot-relevant, but even the ones that aren’t gave me a sparkle of thrill with each new chapter, for the way they brought this world to life for me.

And of course, there’s the magic – in this setting, anyone anywhere can be born with the ability to work magic, but where you’re born determines what kind of magic you develop! That is just an objectively interesting idea, but what’s even better is that Marske traces the domino effect this would have on her world’s international politics and immigration. Moyna’s parents literally had her to order; their people sent them to Sieuxerr (the duchy where Bodies of Magic takes place) to try and have kids with healing magic on purpose – with the goal being that after she graduates, Moyna has to go live in the ancestral homeland she has no connection to, to pay them back for her training, which her parents’ people sponsored. This is not a happy set of circumstances for Moyna – but also, I don’t think I need to lay out for you how much certain people are going to HATE the idea of foreigners coming in, having healer kids, and then whisking them away elsewhere? After Sieuxerr trains them, too! (Though like I already said: it’s not like Sieuxerr isn’t paid for that training! They don’t train healers for free, even as they make it illegal for a healer to go without training, AND WOW DO I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THAT.) And this is far from the only kind of international tension surrounding Sieuxerr; healing magic is considered priceless, the most sought-after magic in the world, which means that despite being quite small, Sieuxerr is incredibly powerful, because no one wants to risk angering them and having Sieuxerr summon back any of their healers who are working abroad.

There’s plenty of tension within Sieuxerr, too: Bodies of Magic is set in the aftermath of a pandemic that, for once, the healers of Sieuxerr couldn’t cure, and many of the healers contracted it while trying to treat it – healers who have had to leave the workforce because this condition leaves them badly disabled. And the people of Sieuxerr blame them for it. This manifests in a bunch of different ways throughout the book, from the looks the characters get on public transport, to the attitude of the police who come to investigate the murder, and it’s all heartbreaking and enraging. These people have free, literally magical healthcare, and they’re mad because…their doctors aren’t gods??? WOW. The entitlement is very real. Aside from that, the dynamic between the magical healers, and the non-magical ones who more closely resemble the doctors you and I know, is also very real, and is also heartbreaking and enraging. There’s just…so much privilege and entitlement everywhere!

Which is not the least of it, but not all of it, either. The dehumanisation of healers is just…appalling. Sure, on one hand they’re revered (or used to be) and highly valued; anyone who murders a healer gets the death penalty. But that death penalty isn’t really about the murder, but because the murderer has stolen from everyone else by removing a healer and their magic from society. Healers who commit terrible crimes don’t go to prison; they’re enslaved for life, and I can follow the reasoning but also, what the actual fuck, people?! That’s the extreme, but let’s go back to, it is legally mandated for healers to be trained – and not because people are worried about untrained healers hurting people by mistake. You would think that a legally mandatory education would then have to be free, but nope, far from it – and the immense expense cripples plenty of healers and their families. It forces healers like Jehanne to mortgage themselves: they find someone to pay for their training, in exchange for the healer having to work for them after they graduate, and I wouldn’t consider that a big deal – it seems perfectly fair on the surface, doesn’t it? – except that we are talking about an education the healer is legally mandated to get. The whole system is designed to force healers to practice healing magic, whether they want to or not, and even if they do want to in a general sense, many are pushed into positions they wouldn’t have chosen for themselves.

Is that fair? Is it right? Maybe it’s selfish to have that ability and not use it. But it sets a terrifying precedent, doesn’t it? And I can’t help thinking of how this reads if we take it as a metaphor for Gifted Kids, the vast majority of whom know similar pressures. Or we can apply it to real-life healthcare workers, who often feel unable to quit terrible jobs because leaving would put even more pressure on their colleagues, and wouldn’t patients suffer, and and and?

How do you balance personal autonomy with societal good?

Despite what you might think after all that, Bodies of Magic is not a depressing story at all. It’s certainly a tense one – I spent a lot of it very anxious for one character or another! – but…this book sparks joy. So much joy. It’s there in Marske’s beautiful, elegant prose, and in lantern-making and festival pastries, in the magic and the wonder of getting to heal people. There’s so much to delight in here, not least in the worldbuilding – like the fact that the healing academy was founded by a nonbinary person, and during the week that celebrates them and the school’s founding, this happens!

Some healers adopted Mathé’s gender as a mark of respect during the feast week, then put it aside for the rest of the year.

Isn’t that such a delightful, beautiful detail? Isn’t it wonderful? Doesn’t it imply so much about this setting’s traditions and views/relationships to gender? I love it!

The relationships between the cast, too, brought me so much joy. There are two romances, yes, which feel delicate and precious without overshadowing the rest of the book, and to be clear I shipped both pairings very hard. But more than the romance, it’s the allyship, the friendship, between the characters that I loved – that we get to watch develop page by page. The way these characters fit together – and don’t fit together, the way they clash and strike sparks from each other, all of it’s wonderful! The way they manage to inspire each other, often without ever being aware of it, is just…EEE! And the way they give each other – not even strength, exactly, so much as…a freedom of imagination? All five characters are in deeply unhappy situations at the start of the book, and none of them see a way out, they all seem destined for pretty miserable futures. And at no point do the characters all sit down to plot together how one of them could get out of whatever situation they’re in – a lot of the help they provide each other isn’t on purpose, isn’t even knowing. But by being themselves, they all stand as examples to the others of…of other ways to be, and that’s such a big part of the book, the feeling of shackles coming off, of stepping out of the cage your family’s or your society’s expectations have put you in, and figuring out who you are outside of them.

This is a book about healing. Which seems very obvious to say – the characters are all magical healers, of course it’s a book about healing! But it’s not (only) a book about magical healing as a practice. It’s about individuals treating and recovering from the psychological wounds that have been dealt them – and it’s about how they need community to do that. It’s about the community of healers, healthcare workers, what binds them together and what isolates them, and whether they can be a genuine part of the wider community – or if that wider community will insist on seeing them as things instead of people. It’s about how sick, metaphorically, a community can be without anyone outside it being any the wiser; it’s about one community refusing to see that another is sick. And it’s about healing as a community, everybody all together, the way we need to if we want civilisation to be worth keeping.

The sheer wild JOY of that is…indescribable. Incandescent. Happy tears everywhere!

I love everything about this book. It is utterly beautiful and deliriously joy-making, it’s poignant and powerful and honestly inspiring, in so many different ways. (Not least as an example of incredible writing craft, good gods!) I love that it is so hard to pin down, that it refuses to fit neatly into any one box; I love how much it made me FEEL. I love how much it has to say, and what it says, and how well it says it. I love the worldbuilding and I would die for any one of the cast.

Bodies of Magic is peerless, is perfect, and a book I will read over and over again endlessly.

You can read the first three chapters of it here!

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