The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman

What a strangely compelling book this was. And when I say compelling I don't just mean your standard 'one more chapter whoops bedtime was three hours ago' kind of compelling. This book was like quicksand.  When I first sent it to my kind I opened it just to check that it had worked, and the next thing I knew I was four chapters deep. I'd plan to read a chapter or two with lunch and lose an afternoon. I was late back from my lunch-break at work yesterday and, yes, there were missed bedtimes.

Pretty impressive, considering I don't even know if I liked it that much. Hell, I honestly can't even pinpoint why I found it as compelling as I did. Take the prose, for example. It might be a result of the translation (this book was first published in Hebrew), but I found it to be on the clunky side. And yet there was an open quality to it, a complete lack of pretense, that made reading the sentences almost effortless. It literally felt like the story was just flowing into me.

The plot, I should have loved. Not because it's exiting or twisty, but because it's really not the focus. Plots happening in the background while characters angst at each other is basically my favourite flavour of book, but even if the plot is in the background it should still make sense. I mean the plot here isn't too complicated; in a world where sorcerers are both common and discriminated against a far-right group wants to kill all the non-sorcerers and take control. Our protagonist, an empath named Reed, and his friends want to stop them. The issue I had is that too often B didn't seem to follow logically from A. It would be like if a car crashed into a tree, and the driver said 'great, now I have to buy more milk!' and the other passengers are like, 'obviously.' There were too many, 'wait, what?' moments from me.

I did really like the worldbuilding. The different kind of sorcerers and how they were introduced. I liked how Reed's empathetic abilities were explored, although I was a little uncomfortable with how they tied into mental health and depression. Honestly though this is not an area I have enough experience in to know if the books portrayal of that was problematic, though the fatalistic way everyone just seemed to accept that all empaths would struggle with depression and suicide seemed wrong to me.

My favourite part of this book was the seers. I liked that they were common, because normally a seer character is rare and OP in any universe. Here they're a dime a dozen, and they're all competing to push things there own way. Little touches like how two seers can become quick friends by jointly "seeing" all the future conversations they might have was one cool example of the unique approach the book takes to them. Although I have to wonder why things are so bad for sorcerers around the world if there are so many seers on their side?

I guess every aspect of this book I could describe as 'pretty good, but...' And yet somehow all of these flawed parts made up a whole that I couldn't read fast enough. Strangely compelling really is the best way I can describe The Heart of the Circle. A big thanks to netgalley for letting me read it.