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Perhaps the cruelest and kindest thing a good book does is make you believe you live inside it for the space of a few hundred pages. That you are a part of something, part of its world, not just skating around the edges, too tied up in yourself to join in…and then it ends and the illusion winks out, like a snuffed flame, and you’re left marooned, adrift, your head chilled in its absence.

From the first page, the real world takes a seat at the back, and Rogerson’s imaginary one holds center stage. In this world, books are a soft warding from the beings that stalk the night and trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickles beneath the surface. But when damaged, even inadvertently, they mutate into ravening monsters rising up in fury, the warp spreading from the pages as sinuously as ink clouding through a glass of clean water, and they are called “Malefics.��

The gist of the story concerns Elisabeth Scrivener who is an orphan raised in the Great library of Summershall where she learned the delicate arts of tending to books and the blunter arts of guarding them against the world and guarding the world against them. Her apprenticeship as a warden has barely begun when Elisabeth wakes up one night to find the library’s Director killed and a Malefic free to loosen its wrath on her city. Elisabeth fights the monster, but before she can even begin to comprehend the magnitude of what happened, she is branded a murderer and a traitor and the charge of her punishment is given to the Magisterium.

When the Great libraries start falling under attack, Elisabeth begins to realize that someone is gathering arms against the Great libraries, colluding in treacheries. Growing resigned to anyone believing her account, Elisabeth seeks the help of Nathaniel Thorn, a sorcerer whose family is dogged with rumors of necromancy, and together they are soon yanked into the machinations of blood, greed and power. Revelations turn truths Elisabeth had known all her life into a tripwire primed to catch her off balance, and danger is dragged to her feet before she even sought it.

Ink and parchment flowed through her veins. The magic of the Great Libraries lived in her very bones. They were a part of her, and she a part of them.

As familiar as the novel’s template is, Rogerson’s success lies in the way she infuses exhilarating new life into it through tenderly compelling characters, luxurious writing and an exquisitely wrought premise. I liked how the author takes several classic fantasy tropes and makes them seem utterly fresh on the page. The result is an immensely immersive novel, as graceful and thoughtful as it is action-packed and pulse-pounding.

Of course, no fantasy setting, however fresh and interesting, springs to life without strong characters to navigate it. On that end, Sorcery of Thorns delivers. The novel’s characters are engaging, and the relationships between them occupy center stage.

Elisabeth’s character takes on a magical aura all her own. Rogerson boldly, brilliantly places her protagonist at the center of a sprawling conflict, and with great relish, she begins to undermine what Elisabeth understands about magic, grimoires, libraries, and her role in it. She challenges not only everything Elisabeth knows, but everything she has come to learn and think about herself. This works so well because Elisabeth has such compelling blend of wide-eyed vulnerability and world-weary wryness. There's an edge to Elisabeth that I really liked too, a keenness of anger and determination, and it's what anchors a very moving journey of self-realization.

Although the supporting cast of characters is not granted a vivacity as stark as Elisabeth’s, together they make a compelling whole. Nathanial Thorn is rich, handsome, and beset by a tragic past. Not to mention: seductive toward men and women alike and blessed with a set of social graces that makes him look irresistible and charming. The perfect YA fantasy archetype. Nathanial is also secretive and strangely solitary in the space everyone else gives him. His mysterious barter with his unsettlingly taciturn servant, his tormented nightmares, the secrets we glimpse only quickly through the corridors of his mansion... all of these things kept me glued to the page. Like Elisabeth, I wanted to shatter the cold mask of stone that Nathaniel seemed to slip down over himself in her presence.

If there’s a failing in Sorcery of Thorns, it’s that the ending feels rushed in the novel’s last few chapters, and too easy to believe (the narrative might have handed the characters a few too many gifts). Minor quibble notwithstanding, Sorcery of Thorns is an enjoyable read, and I kind of hope the author writes more in this world.