The Serpent's Sapphire Song

If you liked Gideon Holt's Salt and Smoke and Anya Roke's Tidelight Archive, this swims in the same brackish channel of industrial fantasy where magic has a cost and cities feel like machines.

The romance threads boldly through the intrigue, so readers wanting a pure caper may bristle; readers who crave heat braided with duty, secrets, and a haunted relic will find plenty to savor.

I wanted a book that wrestles with what art risks under a boot, not one that flinches when the chorus should hit. The theme staggers when it should stride.

We are told that "the most dangerous note to sing is the one your heart insists on"; yet when the moment comes to choose cost over spectacle, the chapters blink and pivot back to gowns, masks, and a coy flirt.

The Purge Barges, the saltworks, the dwindling cantors deserve focus, but the narrative keeps gilding the tea gardens. Resistance turns into a backdrop for banter, and the moral noise that follows is loud without saying anything.

Even the artifact under the flooded vaults feels like a shortcut, a glittering object lesson that reduces a hard choice to a shiny temptation. Themes become trinkets instead of questions you cannot shake.

Yes, the city gleams and the water glows, but beauty without scaffolding collapses. I needed consequence, not ornament, and I left irritated that the song refused to earn its silence!

Mixed bag of clever heists and muddy chases.

• Canal network and sluice puzzles delight
• Kelda and Rafe chemistry snaps
• Mid-book rescues sprawl
• Ending stakes clear but solution telegraphed

Kelda's performance as frivolous heiress versus night-run smuggler convinces; she calibrates her mask with a jeweler's precision, then lets it slip in tiny, aching increments. Rafe's wary duty thaws into curiosity without cheating his code, and their waltz of questions and quips has bite.

I liked how attraction never erases ideology. The dance feels like two tacticians testing the floorboards, not an instant swoon, which keeps the eventual vulnerability sharp.

I went in hungry for briny intrigue and song-magic rebellion, and came out exasperated. The setup promises heat and steel, but the execution wobbles.

The prose is ornate to the point of fog. Metaphors stack until the scene smothers, and key beats slip away. Please, breathe!

Pacing whiplashes. After the first blaze, we idle in silk-slick salons, then sprint through the saltworks so fast the heist loses shape.

POV slips muddle the emotional throughline. Rafe's grim logic and Kelda's secret fire should clash and spark; instead their chapters echo the same mood and repeat the same revelations.

By the time the Basilica's threat takes center stage, the book tries to sing three different songs about martyrdom, romance, and relic-chasing, and none lands cleanly. I closed it frustrated, not shattered, and that stings.

Marrowport feels half-drowned and alive: canals stitched by sluice gates, tea gardens perched over salt-bitten warehouses, alleys where voices have learned to fold themselves small.

The lore hums without footnotes. The Cathedral of Tides, the Sunken Basilica, and the Serpent's Sapphire all carry weight because the cost of singing under surveillance is clear, and that tension makes every lanternlit crossing feel earned.