In 2026, it can be hard to write a book that truly unsettles me. Conversely, as publishers stick closer to books that appease the mysterious Booktok algorithm and strike gold on whatever the trend of the month is, books that take huge risks rarely make their way into my orbit. And it’s both of these things I want from books that label themselves as dark fantasy, but rarely do I get what’s advertised.
Enter: Ava Reid’s Innamorata, a beautiful, ruthless, dreamlike novel that had me sucked in before the end of the first chapter. Reid is a mainstay in my reading collection—I first read The Wolf and the Woodsman when it was released in 2021 and have kept up with them as they found mainstream success with 2023’s A Study in Drowning. From Juniper and Thorne to Lady Macbeth, Reid leans on stories that have unsettled and entertained us for hundreds of years while injecting all of her favorite things: monstrous women, twisted family dynamics, and magic. Innamorata fits neatly into Reid’s style, but tucked inside of its 560 pages is enough strangeness that I found myself constantly asking how this found mainstream publication. To be clear, that’s a good thing.
I mean this as high praise: Innamorata reminded me of a toothache I couldn’t stop touching with my tongue. I knew it would hurt like hell before and after, but I was powerless to stop. I read the book compulsively, at any moment I could find. Frankly, the best time to read it was the middle of the night, when my entire house was asleep and I bore witness to the horrors of the book alone. The book was marketed by Reid as ‘metafictional,’ and there was one moment where this promise came to fulfillment that left me asking the darkness of my room exactly what game Reid was playing.
Innamorata focuses on the final heiresses of the House of Teeth, an ancient family forced to kneel when the island of Drepane was conquered. Cousins Agnes and Marozia are the final hope for the house that once made the dead walk and never fully surrendered to their new rulers. Like Reid’s other works, family is a curse with no cure, and I found the dynamics between Agnes and her deceased grandmother, Adele-Blanche, and Marozia the most compelling relationships in the story. The former matriarch of the House of Teeth has devised a plan to take revenge against the crown consisting of marrying Marozia to the charming prince Liuprand and Agnes discovering the secrets of Castle Crudele, which hides books that Adele-Blanche suspected might contain forbidden magic. Agnes, a mute, arranges the marriage between Marozia and Liuprand but finds herself in a Medieval situationship as she does.
Agnes does not speak until the end of the book’s first section, when she can finally imagine a life for herself beyond her grandmother’s machinations. As such, Marozia often speaks for her cousin with only a shared glance between them. She and Marozia are hopelessly and horrifyingly co-dependent, and the nature of their relationship shifts in the most fascinating and well-crafted ways — it is easily the most fascinating and grotesque relationship of the entire story.
Innamorata is bloody, like its influences (Reid sprinkled in allusions to Game of Thrones, Bloodborne, and The Masque of the Red Death), and rarely pulls a punch when it comes to spilling blood on-page. I think it’s telling that the book opens with the ritual desecration of a corpse and that feels incredibly tame by the time you reach the final three chapters. In Innamorata, there is nothing sacred about the body. Torture, pregnancy, a brutal childbirth, murder, the passage of time — these all change the body and are treated with equal horror.
The body is where my first issue with the book comes in: like many fantasy books of old, the body is used to indicate the morality of characters. Nowhere is this more evident than with King Nicephorus the Sluggard. Like the name suggests, he is fat. Throughout the story, his body transforms to unbelievable proportions as the true depths of his rotten soul are revealed to the reader. There are other villains in the story who are beautiful, but the excessive grotesqueries of Nicephorus grow old quickly. While Reid is clearly inspired by old fantasy that treated the body as a reflection of the morals of a character, maybe this was a trope she should have left in the past. Another weakness of the book lies in the third act, where whole characters altogether disappear. I found myself reading the events of the absolutely bonkers finale and wondering ‘I haven’t seen this person a dozen chapters — where are they?’ throughout. I can only hope I get answers when the sequel is eventually released, but until then, these characters live in limbo.
Here’s what I took away the most from Innamorata: absolute wonder that a book like this could be written and published in our algorithmically obsessed culture. How are you supposed to make aesthetic BookTok edits to on-page bloody childbirth? To violent child abuse? To necrophilia? How can someone make a book filled with hundreds of years of literary references to books that BookTok hasn’t bothered to aestheticize? Reid is a master of the algorithm—A Study in Drowning was a sleeper hit due to its BookTok fans—but I struggle to see how they’re going to make a video about this book. Knowing Reid’s online success, Innamorata feels like a defiant move against the current state of publishing—a reassertion that fiction should be weird and gross and horrifying and uncomfortable, and that to take any of these things away to appease social media is wrong. Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment I can pay Innamorata. It goes completely against what would be easy to write and place on a bestseller list, instead choosing to find a story tucked away in the bottom of a dank, tooth-filled cellar.
