The Prison Healer is perfect for anyone who loves a dramatic identity reveal. Not to overly spoil in the first paragraph, but no one in this book is what they seem.
This review is going to cover the entire trilogy which includes The Prison Healer, The Gilded Cage, and The Blood Traitor. This is a YA fantasy series that covers themes of betrayal, identity, and family, but before I get into the review I should acknowledge that I listened to these books and that the audiobook really impacted my reading experience.
I love audiobooks for classics. Having actual voices speaking the words makes unfamiliar language much more understandable for me. Audiobooks also saved my butt during university numerous times. I could read while doing other things when I had what felt like a never ending pile of books to read every week. Audiobooks are also an amazing accessibility tool for people who have a hard time reading visually. I appreciate that there are a lot of positives for audiobooks, but this audiobook experience left a lot to be desired.
The person reading these books did voices for each of the characters which sometime didn't really make sense. There is a character who has an American accent when everyone else in his family has an English accent. There are also a few characters of color whose voices made me a bit uncomfortable. As a white person, it obviously isn't my place to decide what is or isn't racist, but I do think its important to keep in mind the ways that diverse casts of characters can be played by a single voice actor and the impact that the reader has on the listener's experience of the text. All that goes to say, I found the audiobook kind of annoying and truly would have switched to a hard copy after the first book except for the fact that I had used audible credits to get the entire trilogy.
Ok, so what are these books even about? Kiva is the titular prison healer. She has been in this prison for ten years and was trained by her father to become a healer. This prison is a death sentence where inmates are forced to work until they die, basically. So, Kiva's job is to keep them alive as long as possible. The story starts with three arrivals, a female guard who is kind to Kiva, an attractive new prisoner who gets under Kiva's skin, and another new prisoner, this one a bit more famous, the queen of the rebel movement. The first book is primarily about Kiva taking on The Trial by Ordeal for the Rebel Queen. This is a series of challenges based on the four elements. If you survive them all, you can go free. The Rebel Queen is given these challenges, but when she arrives at the prison she is deathly ill and Kiva, the healer who looks after her, takes her place. We see Kiva struggle to survive the ordeals, relying on the help of those around her, while also trying to figure out a strange illness that is going around the prison and that is only book one.
Since this is a trilogy, a lot happens, but I think the setting is really helpful to bring focus. The story begins in a prison. The prison is all that really matters at first and we get time to become familiar with it before the story begins to introduce bits and pieces of information about the outside world. By the time the story leaves the prison, we are already comfortable with this world and able to shift to a new city with ease. The second book takes place primarily in the capital with a few outings to surrounding towns which allows us to grow familiar with the world outside the prison. Then the third book involves a lot of travel, really expanding the world and exploring surrounding areas. This is a fantastic strategy for world building, starting out with a small space and slowly building the world around it.
Another vital part of fantasy world building is the magic. The prison healer starts out with magic kind of on the back burner. None of our core cast uses magic and we are told that it is a distant thing, only available to a select few, including the decedents of the royal line. The royals have elemental magic: fire, earth, wind, or water. The Rebel Queen and her family have healing magic. By the end of the first book we find out that two of our main characters were hiding that they had magic. Once again, this gives the reader time to understand the way that magic works before seeing it in action. I think that the magic is well crafted in these books. It takes energy and practice. It feels like a part of a person. There is a clear reason for people to have it or not and there is a way for people to lose it.
This bring me to the main criticism I have about the world building. There is a whole legend about the gods giving the queen elemental magic and the king healing magic. There are artifacts called the eye of the gods and the hand of the gods, but the gods aren't really talked about at all. There isn't any type of worship or respect for the gods. The characters don't even think about the gods except for in legend. I think that an acknowledgment of who the gods are and how this society interacts with them would have really rounded out the world and made it feel that much more real.
Another aspect of this book that I found interesting and eventually a tiny bit disappointing is that I really thought it moved away from the Chosen One trope. You know, the idea that the protagonist is super special for some reason and is the only one who can save the day. For the entire first book, Kiva is a regular girl in an awful situation who is just doing her best to survive moment to moment. Sure, she is a talented healer and interesting character, but she is just a random person. And then at the end of the book we find out that the Rebel Queen is her mother and she actually has healing magic and is in fact super special. I wouldn't be upset about reading another Chosen One novel, but the fact that it convinced me that it wasn't and I got excited about that, was kind of upsetting. This doesn't change the quality of the novel, but it does make it slightly more commonplace than I thought it was going to be.
The last thing I want to talk about, is hard topics in YA literature. The general consensus for books with a teenage audience is that they shouldn't shy away from hard topics, but that they should handle them really intentionally and clearly. A book for adults can handle something like addiction with a bit of ambiguity, assuming that their audience is already familiar with the dangers of addiction. With books for teenagers, though, there is a lot less space for ambiguity and every hard topic introduced needs to be handled with care. I think these books try really hard to handle topics with care, but they touch on so many horrible things that it becomes kind of like a general PSA rather than being able to handle fewer topics really really well. These books talk about drug addiction a lot and make sure not to demonize it. They handle it well, showing the ramifications of addiction while also making it clear that it is an illness rather than a moral failing. I think that they do a fantastic job dealing with the complexities of addiction, but then they also touch on sexual assault, self harm, and a bunch of other topics with a bit less care. They are mentioned and discussed with all the right words, but then they are kind of brushed past. They are used as pieces of character development more than anything.
Even as I'm writing this, though, I may be changing my own mind. I would rather something like self harm be used for character development, something that a character has struggled with and found healing from, than for it to be used as a plot point. I do think that these issues are handled with care and an acknowledgment that readers may relate to these topics. Perhaps reading a YA book as a 23 year old is making me judge it unfairly. Maybe if I was part of the intended audience, I would be delighted by the fact that these books don't shy away from discussing difficult things. All of this goes to say that this is an ongoing discussion within literary communities and I have yet to have formed a solid opinion on it. It is another one of those things that I know is important to think about, but I don't know where that thinking is going to take me. Isn't that what good literature does, though, make us think about things we wouldn't otherwise have?
Overall, I see why this trilogy is getting the hype that it is. It is really interesting and has great characters and a fleshed out world. It is a page-turner that doesn't sacrifice quality for sensation.
I give the series 4 stars.
Tropes: hidden identity, forbidden love, found family, chosen one
Triggers: mention of self harm, physical abuse, attempted suicide, sexual violence, severe illness, images of torture, etc
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