FORMAT/INFO:  The Eye of Leviathan was published on July 14th, 2026. It is 499 pages and available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: The Eye of Leviathan is a juxtaposition of whimsy and harsh reality that makes for a brutal examination of religious conversion and colonialism. Many readers will come to this having devoured the author duo's previous series, and I want to set the tone for what you're getting. The Rook & Rose trilogy (one of my all time favorites) is what I would call a "romantic adventure" fantasy. There's lavish balls, masked vigilantes, duels, con artists, crime lords with hearts of gold, all the trappings of a good old time. There's of course danger in it, but it's all a dashing affair.

The Eye of Leviathan, however, is darker in tone. It's a historical fantasy, grounded in an alternate version of our world where the Spanish have discovered a doorway to a faerie realm they call the Sea Beyond. In this history, Spain has given up its claim to the New World (the Americas) in favor of conquering this magical world instead.

The Sea Beyond is full of all the wonder you would expect. There's enchantments, strange creatures, terrible faeries who use the truth to lie to your face, and a whole ocean of moving islands. It's not perfect and it's not a utopia, but it's its own place and has its own culture and way of doing things. When the Spanish arrive, however, they immediately set about shaping the Sea Beyond into their view of how the world should be. Islands are literally pinned down, with some inhabitants slaughtered and others facing a cruel fate: baptism, which removes a faerie's immortality and makes them magically enslaved to those who hold their name. It's not a subtle metaphor, but it's certainly an effective one.

We see all this from two POVs: Estevan, a changeling masquerading as a human to infiltrate the Spanish colonization efforts to disrupt them from the inside, and the Hungry Girl, the mortal child Estevan replaced as a baby who has grown up in faerie and never seen another human until Spanish Conquistadors arrive. Estevan's POV is the more challenging of the two to get acclimated with, as we watch him assume the form of a child and grow over several years. It serves as an introduction to the world, but also required me to brush the cobwebs off my old history education as I tried to place the many names and places that get rattled off at the beginning of the story to establish this alternate history of events. I admit the early chapters were a little rough going because of that, as I struggled to remember what was factual in our world, and what changes had been made for this alternate history.

The Hungry Girl, meanwhile, was an easier character to get to know. Having grown up in wondrous faerie, she knows the ways in which the realm operates. But having never met another human, she is incredibly naive as to how they operate. When she meets the Spanish, she accepts everything they tell her must be true, because these are the only humans she's met and surely they must know the proper way of the world. But as she becomes complicit in their crimes, she starts to question and grow and start to unpack what her people are truly up to.

And that truly is the harshest part of the book, seeing all the beauty and wonder slowly be enslaved and corrupted. Through it all, the Hungry Girl has to wrestle with the hypocrisies and confused messaging of her people, as they tell her the proper way to be, the proper people to hate, the proper religion to follow. I do wish the Hungry Girl had questioned things a little more instead of taking what humans say at face value. After all, she's spent her whole life amongst fae creatures who know how to twist their words to hide their motivations.

The story cuts back and forth between alternating timelines that slowly converge, as Estevan goes through adulthood and embarks upon his present day career. This was where the story started to pick up for me, as the journeys of these two people drew together. Up to that point, I struggled a bit sometimes with feeling a real drive to Estevan's story, as he pursues his career without a real end goal in sight. This book was definitely on the slower side at times, and while I appreciated the magical metaphors, I didn't fully see where the climax was going.

The Eye of Leviathan excels as a condemnation of colonialism while struggling a bit with the overall story. The ending didn't quite catapult me to the sequel; it simply closes one chapter with the promise of a part two. And it felt slower than the ROOK & ROSE books; while those books took me a while to get to, I was so enraptured with the world and the characters I didn't care. This just felt slow overall, especially with some extremely lengthy chapters. It is still a good book overall, but it didn't hit the heights I was hoping of the authors' previous work.