Wizards and Gods: Jessie Mihalik’s Silver and Blood

[alanajoli]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A young woman heads into the forest on a mission to save or protect someone. There, she meets a very powerful person with an amazingly cool house—but she’s trapped, unable to return home. So she has to use her wits to undo some sort of terrible magic in order to win her freedom.

The bones are familiar because it’s an old story. The most familiar (and most cited) version is Beauty and the Beast, but even that hearkens back to the myth of Eros and Psyche. The story evolves every time, which means that for all its familiar bones, the new incarnations can become very much their own thing: Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorn and Roses doesn’t read like A Forgery of Fate by Elizabeth Lim. And while Silver and Blood by Jessie Mihalik begins with those same bones, the novel also borrows from other tales of empowerment and enchantment, putting tropes together in a new way to become its own very compelling series starter.

Riela is a mage, but not a very good one. She managed to save her village from a terrible flood, and now, instead of embracing her as their savior, some of them view her as a dangerous outcast. When one of the villagers encounters a monster in the woods, the town decides it’s Reila’s job to save them. Never mind that she doesn’t know how to use her magic—or even really hold a weapon; Riela saved them once, and she’ll do it again, if she knows what’s good for her.

While this might make some protagonists bitter, Riela swallows the ostracism and goes into the woods, because there are enough good people in the village that she doesn’t want to see them suffer. The alternative would be running off and revealing her magic to the king, who conscripts all mages into his service, and even if that were a thing she wanted, she won’t abandon her home and her people (whether they accept her or not).

Riela’s magic allows her to see other magic, so she begins to track what she thinks is a monster. But when she’s set upon by creatures she wasn’t tracking, it’s the magical glow she’d been following that comes to her aid. The forest, it seems, is full of monsters, and a dangerous mage is doing his best to keep them at bay. He must, because he is trapped within the confines of the woods—as is any creature of magic. So Riela is trapped, too.

The story and relationship between Riela and the mage, Garrick, progresses from here with the pacing one would expect from both a fairy tale and a romantasy. There’s a distinct attraction tinged with danger on both their parts. Mihalik savvily gives us snippets of Garrick’s point of view, revealing that he thinks Riela might be a spy out to harm him or steal from him on behalf of his many enemies. The tension between the two points of view blur; Riela is completely honest with Garrick, cowed by his obvious powers when she knows so little about her own. But Garrick views her actions through a lens of suspicion: “Every action she’d taken could be explained away as accidents individually, but together, they painted a damning picture,” he narrates. Yet he can’t help but be drawn to her, to the way she seems to trust him to have her best interests in mind, to her willingness to put herself in danger to save others. And Riela, for all that she fears Garrick and—as she learns more about who he is beyond a grumpy mage in the middle of a forest—knows better than to get involved with his affairs, can’t stop her attraction to her rescuer. (Riela’s not naïve about romance, either, having had relationships with both men and women prior to the beginning of the book.)

Keeping this review spoiler free means not revealing some of the twists of the way Mihalik uses familiar tropes—Riela’s hidden powers lean into a Campbellian hero archetype (or, at least, some of the same true-identity ground that Melissa Blair leans into in her “Halfling Saga”)—to take the story in surprising new directions. While breaking a curse comes at the end of many “Beauty and the Beast” stories, the curse really only begins Riela’s adventures. Mihalik draws on fairy stories of cruel fae sovereigns and the politics of fairy courts to create a world where Riela’s kindness is a type of superpower. And while Mihalik could easily devalue that trait and make it a weakness that gets Riela in trouble, in this book, at least, it’s a virtue that inspires others to do and be better. That feels like the kind of hero the world needs right now.

Silver and Blood leaves off on a cliffhanger (one that directly undermines the self-sacrificing hero trope, and I am here for it), with book 2’s pub date not yet announced. But it’s worth being in the first audience to read this novel, which hit shelves on January 27, 2026, because it’s likely to become a BookTok darling (featuring not a Shadow Daddy but a Moonlight Daddy likely to make Team BookTok swoon!). Mihalik also left so much room for further worldbuilding—we get a lot of the fae courts and politics in this one, but those hints about the king conscripting mages in the human world has got to come back at some point! So get ahead of the spoilers and enjoy seeing old tales become reinvented into something at once familiar and new.

For more about Elizabeth Lim’s A Forgery of Fate, check out this roundup at Paste.

For more about Melissa Blair’s “Halfling Saga,” you can read this interview about A Broken Blade, or a subsequent interview about A Shadow Crown.