Fairyloot Adult #43: September 2025
I debated for quite a while whether to skip FairyLoot’s September edition. Even before the theme was announced, I had already seen several people guessing which book it might be. FairyLoot often drops subtle hints, and the community is always quick to decode them. This time, everyone seemed to agree. The book that almost everyone predicted (SPOILER: and which indeed turned out to be correct) was one I felt quite uncertain about. It originally started as a fanfiction that gained a massive online fanbase, but has since been rewritten into a standalone story, separate from its original source material. And that’s exactly where my hesitation lies: no matter how well the rewrite might work, will I be able to forget who the characters were originally based on?
Still, my FOMO got the better of me (some things never change), and since FairyLoot keeps winning me over with their beautifully designed editions, I couldn’t let this highly anticipated book pass me by. I was expecting greatness!
The theme for the month was Memory & Malice. Based on those words alone, my mind immediately jumped to John Gwynne, though since he isn’t releasing anything new and doesn’t exactly scream gothic romance, that was clearly just a random word association. Of course, by then I already knew perfectly well which book it would be.
And indeed, the book of the month turned out to be Alchemised by SenLinYu.
“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”
Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.
In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.
According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?
To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own… secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.
To be fair, that blurb doesn’t sound bad at all. It promises a dark, mysterious tale full of intrigue and secrets, definitely something I’d usually be curious about. What did surprise me when unboxing, though, was how incredibly thick this book is. Over 1,000 pages! Yikes. This one’s going to require some stamina, haha.
For this edition, FairyLoot once again created a completely new cover, featuring artwork by @lindseycarrart and design by @aeadraws.
The illustration feels understated, refined, and just a touch mysterious, with the roses fading into wisps of smoke. The glossy alchemical symbols scattered across the cover are also a lovely detail. It’s just a pity that this motif abruptly stops at the spine, even though the artwork itself continues seamlessly. Something that seems to have been overlooked, in my opinion.
The back features the original cover art, but in a different colour palette. Personally, I prefer the original version. The brown tones and the contrast with the red figure give the image much more depth than this red-tinted FairyLoot variant. The uniform red wash, to me, takes away some of the dramatic flair and gothic atmosphere. That small figure in the foreground, which stood out so beautifully in the original, almost disappears here in the monochrome tone.
Beneath the dust jacket, there’s a full-colour foiled character illustration by @elithienart.
And honestly, I’m not a huge fan. The artist is clearly talented, but the style doesn’t quite match what I expected from a dark story partly inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale. I imagined something more subdued, more refined, something that captured the melancholic tone of the theme, like the original cover did.
The sprayed edges, designed again by @aeadraws, feature a pattern of alchemical symbols. On their own, the design and shapes are striking, but they clash a little with the soft, restrained mood of the cover. They use the same symbols as those printed in glossy foil on the front, yet somehow the two don’t quite harmonise. The contrast feels a bit too sharp, despite their similarities.
@elithienart also provided the endpaper illustrations. And again, undeniably impressive work, but not entirely my style. It feels a little too stylised for what I expected from this story. I think I had hoped for something with a bit more gothic symbolism, darker, more atmospheric, perhaps?
One definite plus is that the book is hand-signed by the author, which is always a lovely extra touch.
Hmm. You can probably tell from my tone, I’m a little disappointed in this edition. When unboxing, it was the first time in quite a while that I didn’t feel that usual spark of excitement over a FairyLoot book. And that’s strange, because objectively speaking, this is a stunning edition, designed with a lot of care and artistic talent.
But something just feels off. Maybe it’s simply a matter of personal taste, that it’s not quite my aesthetic, or maybe it’s the lack of cohesion between the different design choices. Everything feels slightly disconnected, whereas FairyLoot editions usually win me over precisely because of their strong visual unity. A shame, really.
Let’s hope the October book brings the magic back!
Cheers,
Charlotte
