This review first appeared in Booklist on September 1, 2026.
Matiu had no intention of ever setting foot back on the Isle of Teeth, the place of his birth—not after the rebel attack that killed his mother and left him for dead when he was a child. But fate, or perhaps Lady Death herself, seems to have other plans. Now a cadet in the imperial army, Matiu—born to a Lyssian father and Songi mother—is pulled into a power struggle between his father’s empire and his mother’s oppressed people. When he crosses paths with Calyx, one of the revenants created—and then abandoned—by his cold, callous father, their destinies become intertwined, forcing both to confront the monstrous systems that shaped them. Drawing on Philippine colonial history, Barbosa’s dark, Frankenstein-inspired fantasy stitches together anti-imperial resistance, ancestral magic, and body horror into a grimly compassionate story about identity, survival, and just who gets to be seen as human. The result is a thoughtful, melancholic fantasy that will appeal to readers interested in stories of rebellion, divided loyalties, and monsters who are more than the sum of their parts.