Alchemy of Secrets (Part 1 - Overview)
October really hasn’t been my month in terms of books I had high hopes for.
Alchemy of Secrets has been on my list for a year, ever since Stephanie Garber (or, at least, a bot account that I fell for) DMed me about it on Twitter. The last book of Garber’s that I reviewed, Caraval, didn't wow me, but that seemed to be an issue if me not being in the target demographic. I was curious to see what she would do with a novel aimed at adult audiences.
Credit where it is due, some of the best aspects of Caraval are on display here. This is a fantasy story which makes good use of Soft Magic. Garber also does a good job of keeping the audience off-balance without the story dissolving into nonsense.
Unfortunately, the worst aspects of Caraval are also on display here. What’s more, those worst aspects are far more destructive to this narrative than they were in that one. Some of this is because this book can’t claim the graces allowed to YA, but the rest comes down to execution. This is a story that had the potential to be great, went down a path that just made it okay, and then was told poorly.
Breaking this down in full will take three parts. This part will serve as an overview for those of you just trying to gauge if the book is worth your time. Parts 2 and 3, releasing on November 4th and November 11th, will dive deep into the weeds for those of you who want a deeper analysis.
Let's dive in.
STATS
Title: Alchemy of Secrets
Series: N/A, though a sequel is in the works
Author(s): Stephanie Garber
Genre: Adult Fantasy (Urban)
First Printing: October 2025
Publisher: Flatiron Books
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for Alchemy of Secrets will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
PREMISE
From the Amazon product page, we get:
What if the urban legends you've always heard about were real?
It starts with a class in an old movie theater. Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban Myths, taught by a woman called the Professor. Most students believe the Professor’s stories are just fiction, but Holland St. James has always been convinced that magic is real. When she tracks down a local legend named the Watch Man, who can supposedly tell you when you’ll die, the world finally makes sense. Except that the Watch Man tells her she will die at midnight tomorrow unless she finds an ancient object called the Alchemical Heart.
With the clock ticking, Holland is pulled deeper into this magical world in the heart of Los Angeles―and into the path of a magnetic stranger. Everything about him feels like a bad idea, but he promises Holland that her sister sent him to protect her. As they chase clues and stories that take them closer to the Alchemical Heart, Holland realizes everyone in this intoxicating new world is lying to her, even this stranger. And if she can’t figure out whom to trust, not even the Alchemical Heart will save her.
I recall an older version of this premise that didn’t mention the Watch Man and put emphasis of Holland encountering the Devil in a bar, though I can't remember when I read it. Maybe Flatiron decided to take the marketing in a different direction after the initial announcement if the book.
Reaction
This premise is on-point.
For that matter, if I’m right about Flatiron changing the marketing to replace the focus on the Devil with focus on the Watch Man, then that change was the right call. The Devil barely plays into this story. One would think he would, given how the motivation established for Holland early in the story is to track him down and confront him, but he ultimately ends up meaning as much to the narrative as any bit of tacked-on drama in The Empyrean.
RATING: 4/10
Alchemy of Secrets sets itself up as a fast-paced, tense thriller, one where the fantastical elements are a set dressing rather than a requirement to understand and enjoy the narrative. It is at its best in that first third. There was actually a point where I thought for a moment that all the supernatural elements were going to be a massive bait-and-switch, and despite the fact I usually tune out of stories like that, I was excited and intrigued.
However, as that initial jolt of danger and mystery faded, problems began to snowball. It started in the prose and structure of the chapters. Warning signs that the plot was about to jump the rails were fulfilled shortly after the halfway point, around which point the characters started to shear apart. Then Garber began to retcon her own lore so aggressively that things stopped making sense. By the time the climax arrived, it couldn’t be more clear that everything was happening Because the Author Said So, not because things were naturally built towards. The story then ended with all plot threads at the least interesting and satisfying outcome they could have reached without the narrative imploding.
It’s so frustrating because the story isn’t bad at a conceptual level. That first third showed its potential. If I were to summarize events without getting into the details, the two-thirds the followed would sound like they lived up to that potential. In execution, though, this book reads like a first draft with a dash of aftshadowing. It’s very disappointing.
BIG PICTURE
All right. As promised, let’s do a high-level review of the major issues. I’ve separated them based upon what we’ll be getting into with Parts 2 and 3 of the view. That way, if you want to read deeper, you’ll have an easy reference of which part to check.
Part 2
Plot
The plot of Alchemy of Secrets is a straightforward MacGuffin hunt. Holland has a clear time limit to find the Alchemical Heart, and she has to string together clues to track it down, bouncing between untrustworthy allies if possible.
The strongest aspect of this narrative is that, much like in Caraval, Garber writes things such that multiple interpretations could be true without the story falling apart. Every person who offers Holland a hand of friendship insists that only they are trustworthy and that everyone else is out to get her. In each of these cases, there is a kernel of truth to what they tell her, and the events proceeding and following their offer make sense regardless of whether or not they truly are her allies. While I’m going to bash the character writing in a moment, I had no trouble believing that a person in Holland’s shoes would make the decisions she does. She is given nothing but bad options and decides from moment to moment which of these allies is the least terrible.
Unfortunately, this strength is more than negated by the narrative’s flaws.
Contrivance drives this narrative forward. For example, there is a scene where Holland only acquires an essential plot coupon because a random shoe she put on in moment of anxiety just happened to have said plot coupon hidden inside it.
The final reveal of the Alchemical Heart renders the entire narrative pointless, a fact made even worse when you realize that there was a puppet master behind everything that happened.
All the subplots of the book are established, ignored, and then half-heartedly terminated at the end, pretending they have satisfying resolutions that they haven’t earned.
The one twist in this book that actually works ultimately doesn’t impact the narrative and mainly exists to justify a device for ramming disturbing imagery into the story. It is a beautiful example of style over substance.
Much like Caraval, Garber chose the least interesting answers to all the mysteries. They’ve not inherently bad answers, but they don’t live up to the story’s potential.
Characters
This narrative is driven by plot, not character. Perhaps that’s for the best, as all of the characters are very flat. Holland is likeable enough to build some investment in her, but not even she gets to grow or evolve. she starts the story seeking magic for a specific purpose and decides she’s satisfied when that purpose is fulfilled. There’s no real journey there.
I’ve seen claims that this book has romance. It does not. Holland runs from location to location, reacts to seeing some hot men, and gets kissed a couple of times. No feelings are developed. There’s not even sexual tension. Imagine if you went to the ward office to pay off your residence tax and got randomly kissed by the clerk at the front desk and the person who handles your paperwork. Unless you are exceptionally lonely, that’s offputting, not romantic.
Garber is as guilty as Yarros of using accessories. Early in the book, we are introduced to Holland’s circle of friends, only one of whom has a recurring role. The other two each resurface exactly twice, once to serve a utilitarian role to drive the story forward and once to exist in the background at the climax. It’s like Garber discovered she needed to justify why random people were helping Holland and chose to simply adjust their backstories so that she could aftshadow them into Holland’s friend group.
Worldbuilding
The lore of this book is inoffensive. Magic in this setting can seemingly do everything, but it is kept in the background, serving mainly as set dressing for Holland’s struggle. There’s a power system that annoys me, but that’s a separate topic - it’s functional here. The main issue is the lore is less the lore itself and more the way that Garber keeps changing it as needed to drive her narrative. It’s like she got to certain scenes, realized the lore she had thus far didn’t work, and chose to say, “Well, now it works differently,” rather than doubling back to fix things.
Part 3
Prose
In Caraval, I gave Garber credit for making a lack of subtlety and constant reminders to the audience of things they already know feel natural. She tries to employ this same method here, but it just doesn’t work. She ends up reminding us for things that occurred mere pages ago, in the same scene, with nothing in between to change the status quo. At least when she did this sort of thing in Caraval, she was reminding us of things as a means of taking stock in between magic plot beats. Here, it’s like Garber thinks her audience has no short-term memory. What’s more, whereas making implicit information explicit in Caraval made it seem like the POV character was obsessing over things and panicking, thereby feeding into the mounting tension, here it actively undermines emotional investment by beating the audience over the head with the obvious.
Also, Garber lies to the audience multiple times, usually for a cliffhanger. The most glaring is a cliffhanger ending that implies something exciting is happening before cutting to a calm moment at the start of the new paragraph. She tells the audience to expect one thing, then immediately cuts to that thing not being a thing, without acknowledging or justifying the misinformation within the narrative.
Overall, this book reads like a YA novel that is trying and failing to be taken serious as a work for adults. There’s nothing wrong with YA when it is being YA. Here, it comes off as amateurish, and since Garber is not an amateur at this point in her career, that’s an unforced error.
Structure
I wonder if Garber was handed down orders by Flatiron to make her chapters are short as possible, as most of the chapter breaks in this book are nonsense. Some of these are false cliffhangers that would be right at home in The Empyrean, but there are dozens more where a chapter just ends on one random line and then continues the scene after a page break. It reminds me of all those weird breaks throughout the chapters of The Eye of Minds. It’s like Garber wrote this book to be maybe 20 chapters long and then fulfilled a mandate for 55 chapters by drawing lines based on word count.
Interlude Chapters
In the early part of the book, Garber has these fun interlude chapters that cover the different stories Holland learned in that Folklore 517 class. They’re basically really long exposition dumps, yet they are cleverly disguised as scenes that add to the eerie vibe of the story. Almost all of these are in the first third of the book, and the narrative starts its descent right after this point. The only interlude chapter after this comes halfway through the book, and despite being very clearly formatted as a separate chapter (right down to page breaks into and out of it), it has no chapter header, making me wonder if trad publishing isn’t even paying to format books anymore.
CONTENT WARNING
Much like Dot Monster Re:Volution, I’m only including this for the sake of consistency, as there really isn’t much worth commenting on here. Sex is referenced in ways that would be safe for American broadcast networks. Violence is minimal and barely gets a description even when it does pop up. Despite Amazon categorizing it as Horror (more on that in a moment), the only element that’s even mildly disturbing are these episodes of bleeding and hallucinations that Holland suffers from throughout the narrative, and even that is kept to the bare minimum needed to convey a vibe. For that matter, despite Amazon further sorting this into the “Occult & Supernatural” sub-genre, the only thing remotely occult in the entire book is an urban legend about the Devil chilling in a hotel bar to cut deals with people. That vanishes into the background pretty early on and then gets explained away.
GENRE
If this book is supposed to be Horror, then Horror must be suffering as much as Fantasy when it comes to being watered down by the modern crop of trad publishing agents.
Simply referencing the occult in passing does not make a book Horror. Simply having scenes of heightened tension does not make a book Horror. When your book makes Hot Fuzz look like The Conjuring by comparison, then your story is not a Horror story. For that matter, every piece of Warhammer content I’ve reviewed on this site (and will review in months to come) has a stronger claim to being horror than Alchemy of Secrets does, as at least the occultism that appears within those stories is objectively linked to existential evils that warp body and soul.
I categorize this book as an Urban Fantasy because that’s a much more forgiving label. We have a world with supernatural elements. It coexists with our real world, hidden from the view of most people. The fact that occultism is referenced is not incompatible with this genre or sub-genre.
BETTER KEPT SECRET
I appreciate Garber for trying to spread her wings and venture into the adult fiction sphere. I really do want to like this book. There are elements here that could have been wonderful.
On the whole, though, this just isn’t a good book. It fails to deliver on the potential of its narrative. I cannot recommend it until you want a case study of how not to do this type of story.
That’s all for now. If you want to dive into the deeper analysis, Part 2 is coming on November 4th, and Part 3 will follow on November 11th.
Thank you all for joining today. Don’t forget to subscribe and share if you liked what you saw here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
