Hugo Awards Review #3: The Tainted Cup + A Sorceress Comes to Call

Two fantasy novels from Robert Jackson Bennett and T. Kingfisher

Princess Hyacinth by Alphonse Mucha (1911)

REVIEW #1

REVIEW #2

Our next round of Hugo Awards reviews is about two more books on the Best Novel slate: The Tainted Cup (by Robert Jackson Bennett) and A Sorceress Comes to Call (by T. Kingfisher). Both myself and Gordon will be giving our takes on each work.

Like last time, we will give each work a “Literary Rating” out of 10 and a “Speculative Rating” out of 10. The Literary Rating will be based on how well the story is written: imagery, sound, and characters, as well as the stylistic ambition of the text. The Speculative Rating will be based on the amount and quality of speculation (societal, technological, and otherwise) in the text and to what degree the story has a “reason for being”. These factors, as well as our overall enjoyment of the text, will be factored into an overall “Holistic Rank” within the category (provisional until all novels have been reviewed).

Both of us will be using a relatively harsh rating scale— please keep in mind that we are using 5/10 to mean “average” for a published short story, and 7/10 to mean a story that we actively like a good amount, not just feel neutral about. With that in mind, let’s get into the Best Novel nominees!

The Tainted Cup

In this Holmes-and-Watson-style mystery, Din—a newly-minted detective with an enhanced photographic memory—is sent to investigate a grisly crime scene in which a tree has sprouted out of an Imperial officer’s corpse. Din and his eccentric superior Ana Dolabra must watch both the seas and their backs as their mission is threatened by colossal leviathans from beyond and powerful nobles from within.

Robert Jackson Bennett

G:

The Tainted Cup was an incredibly well-executed novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. It has an interesting and compact mystery story in a completely fresh feeling fantasy world with a fantastic protagonist.

I don’t really have anything negative to say about this book, and the only reason it is not quite at the level of one of my favorites of all time is that I don’t think it was really trying to be. There weren’t any particularly beautiful passages that I felt moved to write down and quote, and in general the prose was not particularly ambitious. On the other hand, the prose was impressively clear and easy to follow; I never felt confused as to what was happening which was quite impressive given how alien much of the setting was.

The magic of the story is all in the forms of various permanent enhancements to mental and physical capabilities. Our protagonist Din has magically enhanced perfect memory with which he uses powerful scents to properly anchor series of events so he can recall them properly. There are others with enhanced size, strength, sense, or mathematical ability. The drawback is that these operations shorten lifespan, cause infertility, and a variety of eventual other mental and physical ailments.

Sociologically, this is interesting, as those who are most willing to become magically enhanced and become powerful are the poorest and most desperate members of the population; meanwhile, there exists a more classic aristocratic land-owning gentry class which somewhat removed from acting directly in politics due to being unwilling to undergo magical operations that would end the house bloodline.

Overall, the setting of The Tainted Cup is just really cool. The story starts with a man’s body discovered in his bedroom with a tree fully sprouted in hours from the remnants of his corpse. Much of the story takes place in the shadow of the Sea Wall, a wall hundreds of feet tall built on the ocean built to weather assaults incomprehensibly massive leviathans which could spell the end of civilization if they successfully breach. These leviathans have been getting larger every year and there is a constant unease throughout society, as despite the whole empire orienting itself towards stopping these leviathans, everyone knows they may be unsuccessful.

The Tainted Cup clearly takes inspiration from Sherlock Holmes novels with investigator Ana Dolabra filling the role of Sherlock and our protagonist Din as Watson. However, while their dynamic was quite fun, the majority of my favorite scenes of the novel involve Din on his own, which (due to Din’s magical memory enhancements and Ana being a shut-in) involves all of the investigative work of collecting evidence and questioning suspects, e.g. most of the story.

Din is young, inexperienced, unqualified, and socially awkward, and these factors combined with his own neurotic unconfident self-monologue serve to obscure the fact that he is a remarkably good investigator. There are passages where someone attempts to use their supposed grief to guilt Din into passivity or subtly bribe him which fail as Din is able to power through social awkwardness. Take this passage for instance in which Din is questioned by his corrupt former superior officer:

“Tell me everything that happened at that house," Thalamis said. "Now."

My response was quick and clipped: It's against policy to discuss investigations with other officers, sir."

"I could give a shit!" he said. "You tell me what happened, you tell me what the investigator is planning, and you tell me now!"

I allowed a glance at him. I usually saw malice in Thalamis's eyes, but this time I spied hunger. The man was here on a mission, and not his own. Interesting.

"Sir," I said, “you will be able to review all that when I formally submit my report to the Iudex. But it is against Iudex policy to share investigation information now."

“What was that, Signum?” he growled.

“It's the policy, sir,” I said. “I cannot discuss it. It might endanger the investigation.”

"You little son of a bitch," he said. "If I tell you to brief me on what you've done, you had damned well better do it!" “But you are not my commanding officer, sir," I said stoically. "Not anymore. The Apoths commanded me after my alteration, but that changed when I was assigned to Immunis Dolabra at the Iudex Iyalet. I am only permitted to discuss the death scene with her.”

—Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup

Much of the book is filled with conversational exchanges like this which have a very satisfying tension and flow in the moment and often contain important information for the mystery as well. As a character Din is able to satisfyingly exist in these tense situations without backing down or reverting to violence.

Finally, while I don’t wish to speak of it too much without spoiling it the mystery at the center of the plot of The Tainted Cup was very well done, often leaving me with the optimal feeling of retrospectively feeling I should have been able to put things together and occasionally proud of myself for a successful deduction or prediction.

I would recommend The Tainted Cup to pretty much anyone especially if you already like fantasy and mysteries. While I don’t think it is too likely to be anyone’s favorite book, it is so well-executed that it is hard for me to imagine anyone actually disliking it. I will definitely be listing this as my top pick for the Best Novel Hugo award.

Literary Rating: 9/10 | Speculative Rating: 9/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 1/4

K:

“Mm… It’s a remarkable experience… a tooth as long as two men laid end over end. A claw the size of three carriages. The city of Ashradel actually has a leviathan skull from the old days as part of its citadel. It’s about as big as a small fort, I’m told. Quite the site. How astonishing it is to know that the leviathans grow bigger every wet season.”

“I thought that was a rumor.”

“They don’t like to put numbers to it,” she said. “Numbers would make everyone worry.”

—Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup

As a fan of large, imposing entities, I really enjoyed The Tainted Cup. It blended two very distinct elements— the intrigue of a great murder mystery and the threat of unseen horrors from the unknown— to create a very unique, tense atmosphere. I quite liked the dynamic between the main characters Din and Ana, who made a fun pair that was almost comedic at times (despite their serious circumstances). Ana was the capable, confident, slightly eccentric mastermind, while Din was the straightforward, slightly awkward assistant who always turns out to be more capable than he lets on.

I also quite liked the magic and class systems in this novel, which were explained just as much as they needed to be. The novel may have had a pure fantasy magic system, but the way that the characters talked about body enhancement gave it a sort of sci-fi flavor. It was especially fun to imagine Din spewing out information in a trance after sniffing some weird vial to jog his memory.

The Tainted Cup wasn’t particularly ambitious stylistically, but this often wasn’t necessary because of its inherently captivating set pieces. Consider this sequence:

A single mai-lantern glimmered over a large, metal bathing cauldron situated in the center of the dark fretvine room. The cauldron was filled with a curious, whitish fluid that smelled strongly of old milk. Lying in the fluid was a tall Kurmini woman, her head resting back on the lip of the cauldron, her eyes shut, face pale and sweating. Though I couldn’t see far into the milky substance in the tub, she was surely naked beneath it.

This was starting enough, but more startling still was the contraption of rope and wires hanging overhead, which suspended her right arm above the waters—yet her arm lacked a hand. In its place was a pale pink stump, and clinging to the stump like barnacles on the hull of a ship were dozens of tiny black snails, greedily sucking away at her open wound.

—Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup

Almost every physical environment in this novel is built with a similar intensity. From the detective rooms to the crime scenes, the settings are just chock-full of interesting textures that pull you in. It is this steady stream of hypnotizing scenes that gives The Tainted Cup its magic; you just feel really enveloped by its world throughout.

This is admittedly a really odd thing to say in a book review, but many of the scenes from this book reminded me of high-budget ASMR videos. I have written at length about ASMR in the past, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the current VFX era in which creators contextualize their overproduced relaxing scenes with entire fantasy universes. For example, Ana’s interrogation room would have fit right into this series, in which the listener is questioned as a stowaway in the ship captain’s quarters. It has similarly intense interactions in settings filled with many interesting things to look at.

The novel also had great pacing. There were a lot of moving parts in this novel: from the murders to Din’s inner secrets to the looming threat of the leviathans at sea, and Bennett does a great job of balancing the reader’s attention. It never pulled me too far in any one direction, nor did it let me forget about the tension bubbling under the surface. I never felt that any particular part of the novel was overstaying its welcome.

One of my favorite parts about The Tainted Cup was its messaging about institutions, which end up working quite well in the world of the novel. Like most rational fiction fans, I really enjoy reading about competence. And the bureaucracy in the novel (despite its faults), showed a degree of competent governance that was very satisfying. The state of institutional trust in 2025 made this feel especially resonant; it was just nice to see an author going to bat for the often thankless work of civil service.

My biggest gripe with The Tainted Cup was that the central romance in the novel felt a little bit half-assed. It wasn’t bad per se, but it did feel like a bit of an afterthought. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about that particular subplot at all, and it didn’t gel super well with the other parts of the story. I would have preferred it to be either more fleshed out or simply left out entirely.

It was tough to choose between The Tainted Cup and Alien Clay, but I ultimately went with Alien Clay because a lot of the most interesting speculation in The Tainted Cup is ultimately “unproven”. For example, the concept of strange leviathans threatening the empire from beyond the sea walls is very cool, but for me this mostly stemmed from the potential of the idea rather than what was actually in the text. I would have to read more books from the series to see if these elements lived up to their potential.

Still, from a moment-to-moment reading experience perspective, I preferred The Tainted Cup, and I would recommend it to almost anyone. If you enjoy contemporary fantasy at all, do yourself a favor and read this book!

Literary Rating: 8/10 | Speculative Rating: 7/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 2/4

A Sorceress Comes to Call

Cordelia has always lived completely within her mother’s world—literally compelled to obey her orders through magical means. But after meeting the good-hearted Squire—whom her mother plans to ensnare in marriage—Cordelia wonders if she can continue to stand by while her mother carries out her devilish schemes.

T. Kingfisher

G:

I was not a fan of A Sorceress Comes to Call. There were a few good scenes, but the majority of the reading experience was slogging through a young adult novel without any of the normally associated action and excitement.

The first half of the book contains very little action and is mainly concerned with introducing the cast of characters centered around the evil sorceress Evangeline and her daughter, our protagonist Cordelia. Outside of Evangeline, the other characters are all likeable, but not interesting enough to warrant half of the book spent primarily in mundane conversation. The second half of the book is a bit better as there is some amount of action and at least some sense of urgency that permeates throughout even the more relaxed scenes, but as a whole the book was quite slow-moving without a payoff to compensate.

The book begins with one of its few good scenes all connected around Evangeline making her daughter Cordelia obedient. The very first paragraph of the book:

There was a fly walking on Cordelia’s hand and she was not allowed to flick it away.

She had grown used to the ache of sitting on a hard wooden pew and being unable to shift her weight. It still hurt, but eventually her legs went to sleep and the ache became a dull, all-over redness that was easier to ignore.

Though her senses were dulled in obedience, her sense of touch stayed the strongest. Even when she was so far under that the world had a gray film around the edges, she could still feel her clothing and the touch of her mother’s hand. And now the fly’s feet itched, which was bad, then tickled, which was worse.

— A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher

The experience of being “made obedient” is described horrifically, and I think the focus on the mild annoyances that are made unbearable due to her conditions is well done. Considering how great this opening scene was it was shocking to me how poor the remainder of the book was. Here we have a scene which takes an interesting idea and combines it with fantastic prose to create a memorable and tense scene. However, the idea of obedience is pretty much the only interesting one within the book and while there are a few passages which read like this for the most part the book feels like a young adult novel.

The most glaring weakness of this book for me was the moral simplicity. There is a single antagonist, Evangeline, who is purely ontologically evil, and the whole remaining cast of characters purely good; there are no shades of gray.

Additionally, Evangeline is described by the book and its characters as conniving and deceptive, but she is so cartoonishly evil and ill-tempered that it is blatantly obvious upon first meeting to every character outside of the Squire—who is not the sharpest tool in the shed to put it mildly. There are a few times she audibly begins to make a sarcastic comment before interrupting herself to give saccharine praise instead. The result of this is despite her truly terror-inducing abilities and ruthlessness she often feels pathetic as she so completely fails in her attempts to charm or be subtle.

I think the general plot of this book could have been made far better if outside of her treatment of Cordelia, Evangeline was a good-natured, funny, well-liked character who only Hester was suspicious of due to her premonition of doom. Then much of the general outline of the plot could remain similar, but there would be much more tension throughout the beginning and middle.

I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone, but if you are enticed by the premise and none of my criticisms seem particularly off-putting to you, it might be worth giving a shot as it is certainly liked by some people out there.

Literary Rating: 3/10 | Speculative Rating: 4/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 4/4

K:

My general feeling about A Sorceress Comes to Call is that it would have been perfectly decent as a children’s book but really fails as an adult book. I can appreciate a simple story, but some of the scenes felt really heavy-handed and sanitized considering that the book was targeted at adults. Consider this particular exchange:

“What would happen?” breathed Cordelia in fascinated horror.

“Well, if he’s an honorable man, he marries you.”

“What if he isn’t?”

“Then if you’re unlucky, he marries you anyway. Otherwise, he gets away scot-free and you’re ruined for polite society.”

“But that’s not fair!”

…

“I know. It’s utterly ridiculous. It would almost be funny if so many girls didn’t suffer for it.”

“But why?”

Hester lifted her shoulders in a vast shrug. “Men are terrified of being cuckolded.”

“Of what?”

…

“All right,” she said, putting the flask away. “Let’s start at the beginning…”

—T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call

There were a lot of very tedious passages like these that felt almost sanitized for the reader’s benefit. Cordelia would be unaware of some mature topic, and then an older and wiser adult would explain it to her. In this particular example, I got the sense that the next bit was left out because it would be too inappropriate… but too inappropriate for whom, exactly? I wasn’t exactly sure who was being served by these sections, but it would make total sense if the book was meant for younger audiences.

This heavy-handedness extended to the plot and characters, which never develop into anything other than what they first appear to be. The antagonist is cartoonishly evil and never displays any remotely sympathetic motivations. The plot never has any real twists or turns (with the possible exception of the horse Falada becoming more and more terrifying). Again, this simplicity would be perfectly understandable (even preferable) in a book meant for younger audiences. But given that it was presented as a book for adults, I have to judge it accordingly.

With that being said, this book wasn’t completely without merit, and in particular I thought some of the horror elements were quite good. The mechanic of Evangeline controlling Cordelia was simple but very well done, and the passages describing her being ensnared with her mother’s magic were my favorite parts of the novel:

She couldn’t scream. That was the worst of it, somehow. If she could have screamed then she could have wedged the scream in between herself and the pain, but her body didn’t scream, not even when the knife slipped, not even when she began sawing mindlessly away at her own flesh, cutting off a shallow triangle of skin and leaving a bloody flap that hurt and hurt and went on hurting, even after the obedience dropped and she dropped the knife and then fell over on her side, clutching her leg, and had no strength left to scream with.

—T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call

I also thought the horse Falada was a pretty compelling villain, much scarier than the supposed main villain Evangeline. There is a tense moment in the story where all the stablehands are questioning whether Falada is actually evil, and then he suddenly does something distinctly non-horselike that kicks off the next action sequence. And the moment at the beginning where Falada is revealed to be a pawn of Evangeline rather than an ordinary horse was a disturbing moment that definitely stuck in my mind.

In the end, though, this just wasn’t a very interesting story. I found it readable, but I can’t say that it did much else for me.

Literary Rating: 4/10 | Speculative Rating: 2/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 4/4

Conclusion

In the end, Gordon picked The Tainted Cup as his new favorite of the bunch, while Kevin rated it a close second. None of us really liked A Sorceress Comes to Call at all, so the two Adrian Tchaikovsky novels are still at the middle of the pack.