Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Brown bi/pansexual MCs, brown nonbinary MC, M/NB, secondary F/NB, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 16th June 2026
ISBN: B0FX4LXS2X
Goodreads
A talented heretic and the emperor she both loathes and loves will learn what monsters are really made of in the second installment of the Moon Heresies trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
Iriset—prodigy, outlaw, now sunderer—has broken the Moon-Eater god’s prison at the heart of the empire. But the consequences of her actions land her in a city of monsters where the heretical magic of human architecture is freely practiced, and the only person she knows—and can trust—is Lyric, the emperor she’s lied to and loved in equal measure. As scheming kings and capricious gods drive them towards different extremes, they soon realize that to find their way home, they must remake the world…at the risk of breaking it forever.Praise for the Moon Heresies
"Laced with a vivid sensuality." —Jacqueline Carey, New York Times bestselling author of Kushiel's Dart"A beautiful, elegant, passionate novel. A triumph and a delight from start to finish." —Antonia Hodgson, author of The Raven Scholar
“Sensual and suspenseful.” —Publishers Weekly
"A lush story of dangerous intrigue in an intricate and utterly unique world." —C. S. Pacat, author of Captive Prince
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
~go big or go home
~go big to go home
~one (1) unicorn
~magic prosthetics
~Silk is Syr
:Read my review for book one, The Mercy Makers, here!:
:implicit spoilers for The Mercy Makers ahead!:
Shape of Monsters is unlike its predecessor in all ways but one – it’s excellent.
This is a slower, more thoughtful book than Mercy Makers was; there’s much less forward momentum, and for the first half or so there is less of a unifying plot. But there are many smaller plotlines, intimate and emotion-heavy, philosophical while focussing on the human element of every Big Question. Iriset and Lyric both have to deal with the reality of their relationship, and both of them undergo a lot of growth, albeit in pretty different directions. There are new characters to fall in love with, and a lot of revelations, including many retroactive ones. And all the wonder and beauty and magic of Mercy Makers is on full display in its sequel.
Thought strips away, worries and wonder, everything, until Iriset is sensation, she is wind and starlight, laughter.
In Shape of Monsters, Iriset and Lyric are transported far from the world they know, and in so many ways that strikes me as genius, because who are they – who are they to each other – outside of the context they’ve always known? What happens when Lyric is no longer a goddess-ordained emperor, but someone with no power at all? What is Iriset when she is no longer a heretic, but is free to practise her magic openly, surrounded by peers? Was it only their context that made their love so terrible, can they make something real outside of it? The dynamic between them is reversed; suddenly Iriset is the one with all the influence, respect, the one people listen to and revere and consider important, and Lyric is only her spouse.
Iriset is more powerful than Aharté.
It’s the way Shape of Monsters is written, even more than the story itself, that delights me. As in Mercy Makers, Gratton does so much with tenses, with gleefully casual asides to the reader, dropping details that rip the rug out from under us as if they’re nothing. It starts on the very first page, when someone we know is dead is referred to as very much alive, and that is only the start of the oh, fuck moments, the mic-drops and table-flips. Mercy Makers challenged genre conventions in a lot of ways; Shape of Monsters does the same, but tackles different conventions, different reader expectations. The entire book hinges on something that’s usually considered a sci fi trope, not a fantasy one; the shape of the story itself completely disregards the typical three-act structure most of us take for granted; but maybe most shocking is the realisation that none of these characters are safe. Which shouldn’t be shocking, we should have already known that after what Gratton pulled in Mercy Makers – and yet!!! Shape of Monsters is gutting, and it hurts worse and cuts deeper because so much of it feels soft. The unhurried pacing…it got me to lower my walls, made me unafraid, and THAT WAS A MISTAKE.
“That is what you fail to understand, Lyric Aharté,” the (spoiler) croons softly. He caresses Lyric’s cheeks. “I am a monster of extravagance, of ambition. Excess and splendor. I don’t do little things. It’s a waste of my time.”
I adored the worldbuilding in Mercy Makers, and despite Shape of Monsters taking place in a different setting, we actually still learn a lot about Moonshadow City and the Empire of Silence. We learn about it through contrast, and it’s just GENIUS. Things we never learned in Mercy Makers, because Iriset took them for granted and thus never drew the reader’s attention to them, are revealed now that Iriset is somewhere different. My favourite example of this was the trees: in seeing what we would consider normal trees, Iriset realises that trees and other plants don’t naturally grow full of right-angles – because apparently that’s how trees grow in Moonshadow City. And we never knew that! That kind of – shockwave of realisation, that flows backwards to alter what we thought we knew – EEE! It’s SO COOL and SO CLEVER and I love love loved it!
But that contrast – between Moonshadow City and where Iriset and Lyric end up in Shape of Monsters – between the way of life that is Aharté’s Silence and a place that’s never heard of such a thing – it’s more than just delightful for worldbuilding obsessives like myself. Gratton is showing us, teaching us, important fundamentals about this world, about the regime Iriset (and me, and presumably most readers) hated in Mercy Makers. It’s not a lecture, but it does feel as though we’re being encouraged to consider…not which way is better so much as, the pros and cons of both. Iriset idolised the Apostate Age, when there were no rules at all governing what design magic could be used for – but maybe it’s not such a great idea to have no rules at all? Maybe it’s more complicated than saying all the rules or no rules? I never got the sense that Gratton had an ideal, a clear conclusion they wanted readers to come to – more like they ‘just’ wanted their readers to think.
I am very much in favour of books that want me to think.
That had been Amaranth’s first taste of hating progress, hating justice, because it took something away from her that she wanted.
The one thing that bothered me about this was…in this new setting, where there are no restrictions on design magic, there didn’t seem to be a clear consensus about chimeras – people who have been massively altered from human baseline, generally while in the womb. One chimera we meet, Eliri, is a universally-respected practitioner of design, and is married to one of this new city’s leaders. She seems to have all the rights a person should have. But Setka, another chimera, is disposable; despite being fully sentient, when we meet her, she’s about to be destroyed because her father/creator is done with her and wants to strip her for parts. And though Iriset does ask what the difference is between Eliri and Setka, we never actually get an answer. In a city that doesn’t seem to have any kind of slavery, I didn’t understand how this attitude re (some?) chimeras being disposable evolved. It niggled at me a lot, especially because this attitude towards chimeras is one of the worst aspects of this new setting, a huge piece of the argument that no rules at all is bad actually. It felt a little forced to me.
(Though it has occurred to me that this might just be me being naive. I always want terrible things to make sense, to have a reason, but in real life they often don’t, so.)
Which is not to say I didn’t love the challenge of the issues Gratton raises here. The one that jumps out at me is: the most heavy-duty alterations to the human body are done during pregnancy, with a ‘fetal mesh’. Usually there are a lot of dead infants before a designer successfully creates whatever chimera they had in mind. This is extremely off-putting, and there’s a movement to have this kind of human architecture banned because of that. But to me, this brushes up against the same core issues as abortion rights: I don’t see how you can forbid this kind of alteration without also ending the right to abortion. The movement in Shape of Monsters – the group that calls themselves Hopeful Design – say design magic should only alter someone with their consent, which seems very reasonable! But…they say a foetus can’t consent. Which is true! But if you can’t alter a foetus because it can’t consent, aren’t you giving it personhood? If you say you can’t act upon a foetus because it can’t consent, aren’t you criminalising abortion too?
And I don’t think that’s me digging too deep into the worldbuilding; I think this kind of thing is very deliberate on Gratton’s part. I think we’re meant to realise that the ‘good guys’ are flawed, that none of the leaders or would-be leaders in this story should be sided with blindly, that anyone can be a villain if looked at from a different perspective (very much including Iriset). I think Gratton is challenging us to look past our own knee-jerk revulsion at the image of a graveyard of dead infants and think about where that revulsion might take us. And thus: challenging us to look past all our knee-jerk reactions, positive and negative, and – see and understand what it is we’re reacting to, instead of what we think we’re looking at.
Again: I didn’t get the impression there was a specific conclusion I was meant to come to. Gratton’s not using Shape of Monsters as a pedestal for their own opinions on bodily autonomy, or anything else that comes up. It’s simply that Gratton writes Fantasy that is messy and complicated and doesn’t have neat delineaments between Good and Evil. They don’t write Fantasy that is comfortable, and I adore it.
“I don’t want to be holy,” she says.
“Then you shouldn’t act like a god, Silk,” he says with just a hint of the bite she knows so well.
Especially because Shape of Monsters feels so comfortable. The unrushed pacing, the more introspective story, makes this book feel…not cosy, but not a million miles away from it, either. Soothing. Soft. Easy. But that is camouflage, a magician’s trick, a beautiful mask over something with sharp teeth, and this is a book that bites. It questions and challenges and shocks, it pushes genre conventions and reader boundaries (monster-fucking! World-altering magic fuelled by orgasms! I think the numen might be a sentient nuclear reactor! Allllll the body-modification! A god excited to die! Very not-traditional romance beats! The validity and purpose of religion! What is free will! So much else I can’t mention because spoilers!!!) The way this book makes Iriset a hero and a villain – no, how it makes it clear that she already is a hero and a villain, has always been, but the villainy, the harm, was much less obvious to us in Mercy Makers. We were squarely on her side there; she was resisting against a totalitarian regime that we had every reason to despise. Outside of that context, we can’t not realise that Iriset is…exactly what she always told us she was.
DO YOU COMPREHEND THE GENIUS OF THAT??? Do you see how Gratton is playing with, has played, our expectations, even our perception of what this story is and who these characters are??? I CANNOT GET OVER IT.
(And to be clear, I love Iriset even more for being Like This. She has always been an incredibly unique protagonist, she has always been thorny and complicated and deeply morally-grey, and I adore her. Show me one main character anywhere who compares!)
I love it. I LOVE IT.
This is a very different book from Mercy Makers. You will have to shift mental gears to appreciate it fully; you will have to pay attention, and think about what you’re shown. But MY GODS, it is worth it. Shape of Monsters is subtle until it’s not, quiet until it isn’t, soft in the telling and brutal in its implications. It is so incredibly clever, and thought-provoking, and challenging; it is a book that makes you question what you see and what you think and how you feel. It is surprising and beautiful and changes shape like a numen, shapeshifting from chapter to chapter. It will reward the right reader endlessly.
I cannot WAIT for book three!
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
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