Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual brown MC, secondary brown sapphic character, minor nonbinary character, minor trans character, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, present-tense
Published on: 17th June 2025
ISBN: B0DJLTYMKR
Goodreads
A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love—either way, her choice will upend the world, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk?
Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her alter ego Silk to create magical disguises for those in her father’s organization, but she longs to do more with her talent: to enhance what it means to be human by giving people wings, night-sight, and other abilities; to unlock the possibilities of gender and parenthood; to cure disease and even to end mortality itself.
Everything changes when her father is captured and sentenced to death. To save him, Iriset must infiltrate the palace and the empire’s fanatical ruling family. There, she realizes she has a chance—and an obligation—to bring down the entire corrupt system. She'll have to entangle herself in the lives of the emperor and his sister, getting them to trust and even to love her. But love is a two-way street, and Iriset’s own heart holds the most mysterious and impenetrable magic of all.
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
~definitely siding with the criminals
~let’s fuck up biology with magic
~screw the gods
~screw everyone you like
~fantasy as a concept, queered
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
*
This book is perfect.
There are no ‘but’s*. There are only ‘and’s. ‘THIS thing is perfect and THIS thing is perfect and THIS OTHER THING ALSO.’
I will tell you about them. I will. But it’s hard. Mercy Makers is too much for me to discuss lightly; too much made for me, all my feelings for it intimate and raw and feral. Mercy Makers feels private, precious, printed in my blood on parchment made of me. As if Gratton reached into my deepest heart and spilled everything they found out onto the pages – and half of what they found I didn’t know was down there. Whispers, wishes, half-formed, wordless longings that Gratton crystallised and spun into stained glass windows, all jewels and light and breathless, hurting awe.
What do you do when someone takes everything you ever wanted – and everything you didn’t know you wanted – and makes it heart-stoppingly, stunningly, searingly beautiful before they give it back to you?
What the fuck. How dare. Who gave you the RIGHT.
Thank you.
So bear with me. I’ll do my best, but this is hard. Mercy Makers means too much to me to make this easy.
*
Here is a world that once had two moons. But one fell, and out of it came a god, and out of the god came a city, and out of the city came an empire. It is a place where everyone wears masks, to keep mages from stealing their faces; where same-sex relations are looked on benignly but any pairing that could create a pregnancy is regulated; where the ‘pope’ gives her god a spiritual orgasm every day. Graffiti moves and morphs, criminals are unmade without mercy, and healing is heresy. Silence is everything.
Here is a world.
And here is the woman who is going to break it.
Her name is Iriset, but she prefers Silk. She is a master of human architecture – using magic to alter or repair living tissue. This makes her a heretic. She doesn’t care. She’s obsessed, passionate, about the search for knowledge, about experimenting, pushing boundaries, learning. She is a hedonist, inspiringly, sublimely sensual; she is ruthless, except when she is not. She is wickedly, dangerously intelligent; she is excellent at justifying what she wants. She is manipulative, devious, and gloriously unashamed. (Of what? Everything.) She is not amoral, but she’s close, from certain angles – or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she has her own code of ethics, and it won’t always line up with yours.
shake the empire to its core because that’s what they deserve, that’s what everyone who pretends the laws of Holy Silence matter more than lives and healing and progress and science and hope and all those other things Iriset doesn’t believe in but must be better.
She’s not the linchpin, but she is the catalyst. The lit match dropped into the lake of oil.
Boom.
*
Everything about this book is perfect.
That makes it hard to know where to start.
*
Mercy Makers is incandescent, equal parts sensual and feral, thrillingly defiant of genre and societal convention alike. It is respendently, revellingly, ravishingly strange; not Weird Fiction, which is so aggressively bizarre it elicits a knee-jerk recoil from most of us, but something far more entrancing, seductive. Mercy Makers dresses itself in silken camouflage and eye-catching jewels to trick and distract you, make you think you know what it is. And so you feel safe, comfortable; and so you let your guard down; and so the strangeness seeps in to you, like dye that won’t ever wash out.
Aharté’s silver-pink moon hangs like a pearl affixed to the brocade of the sky.
Here is a jewel, sparkling: long before the book starts, the setting of Mercy Makers had four genders. How interesting! What a neat little detail, decorative and unthreatening because it is not plot-relevant.
Here is the true strangeness, subtle and easily overlooked, but subliminally ground-breaking: Iriset describes every new person she meets as masculine- or feminine-forward. She is not assuming their sex or gender; she is marking how they present, separating physical markers from gender. A ‘fem-forward’ voice is not necessarily a woman’s voice; it just registers as feminine. Someone who is strongly masculine-forward is probably a man, because if they weren’t they would be suppressing or obscuring that which reads as masculine. A body – what Iriset calls their ‘design’, or sometimes ‘outer design’ – can be masculine-forward, but if the person is wearing feminine-forward clothing, then they’re probably a woman. It’s subtle and quiet and Gratton doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it is a big deal, it’s an approach to gender and sex that is revolutionary to the one most of us are walking around with!
(This is not even close being the only groundbreaking thing Gratton does with gender in this book, and I can’t not talk about one of the others. Real quick: neopronouns are newly invented pronoun sets intended to be gender-neutral or nonbinary, and almost all of the English ones mimic she/he in spelling and pronunciation. This is a problem, because it causes a lot of people to read or hear ‘ze’ or whatever and reflexively associate it with male or female, because it looks like and rhymes with he or she. It’s hard to encounter someone, even a fictional someone, and try not to tag them male or female in your head; pronouns too close to gendered ones don’t help with resisting that reflex.
Gratton uses a/an/ans – functioning like he/his/his – for their nonbinary character in Mercy Makers, and I cannot convey to you what a galaxy-brain moment that was for this particular nonbinary bookwyrm right here. I cannot convey to you how it wrecked me, to finally be able to articulate why so many neopronouns are unsatisfying. I didn’t consciously understand this was a problem until Gratton casually solved it. My mind is blown, my eyes are full of tears, my heart is too full for words. This is a BIG DEAL, and of course it took a nonbinary writer as brilliant as Gratton to think of it.)
“I am strong enough to offer trust first.”
Then you start to realise that the culture Gratton’s created doesn’t value or treat men and women differently at all. You might think, for example, that the position of Moon-Eater’s Mistress – the head of the dominant faith – is one filled only by women; it’s the word ‘mistress’, I think, and what that means in our world. But nope: past Mistresses have been men, and in fact the current emperor wishes he’d been born second because he’d much rather be Mistress than emperor (which imperial sibling gets which role is based only on birth order). This is only one of many examples. It’s surprisingly difficult to find modern fantasy settings that aren’t at least a little bit patriarchal – comes of the writers growing up in patriarchal cultures and not scrutinising their own biases and worldbuilding enough, is my guess. And when you do come across an author who’s trying to do this, they usually forget to populate the book with enough background women to be convincing; most of us automatically make filler characters men (unless it’s a role that’s stereotypically woman-ish, like nurse or nursemaid) and when 90% of your unnamed characters are men alongside most of your main cast, your ‘the sexes are equal here’ fails to convince. Gratton has neatly skipped over both these pitfalls; the sexes are equal here, down to the tiniest details, and there are women everywhere, named and unnamed. And while many readers aren’t going to be able to articulate what it is about this setting, they are going to notice subliminally. Femme-full settings make an impact. They feel different. (And wonderful.) This is yet another way that Gratton has, quietly, flipped the tables.
“I will,” Iriset says, condemning herself to glory.
Not all of it is quiet. The jewels of the more overt worldbuilding are flawlessly cut and placed, drawing the eye and dazzling: the magic system, called architecture, with its intricate designs of four-fold forces; rainbow bees; a goddess and her wife. This is a rich, sumptuous world spilling over with wonders and strangeness, and Gratton has gone wild in creating a setting that reminds you of nowhere else, that is thrillingly original, that feels like Fantasy, capital f and all. I would even go so far as to say this isn’t merely queer fantasy; it’s queered fantasy, fantasy done different. This is what Fantasy is supposed to be: imagination that takes no prisoners, that indulges itself and revels in doing so, that has no interest at all in what is conventional, normal, expected.
The person has seven big eyes arcing across their face and forehead, each starry and bright like a different hour of the night sky between twilight and dawn.
That lack of convention continues into the precious-metal setting for all those gemmed details, parts of the book even less obvious than the worldbuilding, but easily as subversive. (Are subversive and sublime related? In Mercy Makers they are.) More readers pick up on worldbuilding than the nuances of the actual writing, though in Mercy Makers the two are closely related; the prose reinforces the worldbuilding. It’s the way Gratton writes about sex – not just unashamedly, but depicting sex as something to revel in because bodies are something to revel in, less a counter-argument to the Western ideas about sex and shame than a complete ignoring of them. It’s the language Gratton uses to describe fatness, as if fat-shaming has never been a thing at all. It’s the off-handed way in which we learn that in this setting, marriages can be between more than two people. It’s the seemingly accidental way Gratton breaks convention in their prose style: View Spoiler » are such mind-reeling choices that are done so damn quietly – and that’s what makes them so mind-reeling, that’s why you reel, because Gratton wields them like scalpels and sets them off like bombs and if it had been less subtle the explosions wouldn’t have been as big.
Sheer silk and the most delicate layers of linen drape her thick, rolling body, hugging breasts and hips and belly as if that cloth were the most blessed thing in all the world for being allowed to drift so near her flesh.
And all of this is without even really touching on Iriset as a character, who is herself, quite literally, a living middle finger to convention, both in her own world (heretic, remember) and in ours, because how often are we allowed to have morally-grey, ambitious women characters who are extremely horny with none of that negating their sheer, once-in-a-generation genius? And without touching at all everything Gratton has to say about empire, and love, and mercy; about faith and heresy and not finding a kinder interpretation of religion but going fuck the gods, actually; about how everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, every single conflict in the book, can be distilled down to stagnation/stasis vs creativity/life. I could write a THESIS on all the ways sex permeates this book and the way it’s presented and someone smarter than me had better do it, because if I do it I the entire thing WILL be in caps-lock. Let me say instead, as a kind of shorthand, that Mercy Makers is the spiritual heir to Kushiel’s Dart, which is probably why they put Jacqueline Carey’s approval on the cover, as they should.
“The very existence of the Days of Mercy proves that the regular state of empire is a merciless one.”
Or the PLOT, which is Iriset-worthy (which is to say, genius). Everything in the book’s synopsis is technically accurate, but nothing plays out the way the synopsis implies it will, and I was endlessly dazzled by the way Gratton never did what I expected (yet another way this book ignores convention is in its plot-beats). This book had me anxious, breathless, furious, terrified, freaked, exulting and, at one point about halfway through, I had to put the book down and sob for about an hour (GRATTON YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID). The twists, the table-flips, and yet none of it done for shock value, all of it fitting together like an architectural marvel.
Apostasy only exists if you believe in god.
The edifice of wonder Gratton has built here is breathtaking.
(This book even manages to be funny! On top of everything else, it made me laugh! Humour is probably the hardest thing to write ever and Gratton did that as well!)
Iriset was not made for emergencies. She should be kept in a locked room with design tools and left alone.
The Mercy Makers is opulent, decadent, extravagantly strange and exquisitely lush, all velvet and crystal and sharp, broken glass. It is deeply queer and completely nonconformist. It’s inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what it inspires; there is no other book like it. It’s a glamour-bomb dropped into a genre that’s in need of a little waking up. It’s…
It is literally everything I ever wanted. I have sometimes said that in reviews before; sometimes, if I am feeling extra-brave, I have been honest enough to say, everything I ever wanted, except unicorns. Well, Mercy Makers even gave me unicorns.
the delicate unicorns fled, too intelligent to be captured, and it is possible some live in the wilds beyond the empire
Words don’t do Mercy Makers justice, so allow me to invent a new one for it: irisedent.
(Nobody tell Iriset, I can only imagine how smug she’d be to have inspired a new adjective!)
irisedent/ˈɪrɪsɛdɛnt/ adjective
1. Relating to or characteristic of Iriset mé Isidor; genius; mind-blowing; perfection.
Irisedent. Sublime, subversive, scintillating. The best book of the year; easily one of the best books of the decade. Or maybe it’s quicker to just say: everything.
This book is EVERYTHING.
And it’s out next Tuesday. Go preorder it IMMEDIATELY.
*But so many butts. :D :D :D
Yes yes yes! So happy to hear this (although I’m going to avoid reading beyond your introduction for now, and pop back later. :)
I’ll definitely be snagging a copy Tuesday!
*FLAILS* YES GOOD EXCELLENT! Come scream with me about it once you’re reading it!!!