Arcane meets Upright Women Wanted for fans of Gideon the Ninth in this bloody, ferocious sapphic fantasy.

Y’all. I’m absolutely obsessed. This is d*ke required reading.

This book is so hard to describe. I’ve been sitting here starting sentences and deleting them, struggling to properly encapsulate my excitement for all the brilliance of its storytelling. There’s so much happening here that is just so easy to praise from its gripping action scenes to its brilliant reveals to its malleability of style.

I think the thing that’s really sticking with me though is that this book feels like an underdog. It’s not the cleanest or tightest book I’ve read in terms of prose or pacing, in fact, I struggled through the book quite a bit with its pacing. (Scenes that were short should have been long, scenes that were long should have been short, and once I put the book down, it was tough to get back into the world.)

But its flaws provide a delicious texture that adds to the utter camp of it all. This book was nothing if not unbelievably ambitious and the difficult work of climbing to those heights shines through its pages. And, honestly, I kind of love that you can see Clarke’s blood, sweat, and tears in building this beast of a narrative leaking through. If it was too seamless or if it looked too easy, it would lose so much of its charm. It’s not so much a hidden gem, but an undiscovered labyrinth, sprawling and gritty and formidable.

I guess the best way to review this book is really to pitch it! So if you like:
-badass butch book girlfriends
-fighting capitalism
-large casts of characters
-complex world building
-The Locked Tomb series
-nonlinear storytelling
-experimental prose
-messy lesbian relationships
-hopeful narratives
then you should read Metal From Heaven.

(I also want to shout out my friend Bailey who encouraged me to request an ARC–and by encouraged I mean screamed at me every chance she could–and who wrote a really lovely and better worded review of this book that you all should go read!)

And THANK YOU to Erewhon for shipping me an ARC of this book across seas (even when I hadn't finished my other ARC from them) in exchange for an honest review.

CW: violence, blood & gore, sexual content, homophobia, death of parents, death of siblings, grief, loss of loved one, character death, gun violence, police brutality