Emilie des Marais is more at home holding scalpels than embroidery needles and is desperate to escape her noble roots to serve her country as a physician. But society dictates a noble lady cannot perform such gruesome work.
Annette Boucher, overlooked and overworked by her family, wants more from life than her humble beginnings and is desperate to be trained in magic. So when a strange noble girl offers Annette the chance of a lifetime, she accepts.
Emilie and Annette swap lives—Annette attends finishing school as a noble lady to be trained in the ways of divination, while Emilie enrolls to be a physician’s assistant, using her natural magical talent to save lives.
But when their nation instigates a frivolous war, Emilie and Annette must work together to help the rebellion end a war that is based on lies.
Jan’s Review
This novel centers around two young adults who swap lives to follow their dreams. One wants nothing more then to become a physician and to achieve things beyond those of the noble lady her mom is pushing her to be. One wants nothing more to be trained in magic and to prove that she is more then her station in life and that divination is where she will thrive.
In order for this to happen Emilie hatches a desperate plan with no planning as she spots a random girl who looks enough like her that they are able to switch roles and both move on to the education they so want. In this world men get to train as physician and nobles get higher safer position in their field those girls must fight obstacles after obstacle to gain strides in their chosen professions.
Underneath all of this is an underlying problem with the magic side of this realm. Magic has a cost and in order to avoid this cost the rich use lower rank “Hacks” to perform the magic and to get the recognition from achieving great things.
When Emilie and Annette uncover what is happening to the lower ranks beyond being hacks all hell break loose and intensity really hits the fan. What really made this novel stand out is even though these two characters never met before they decided to swap lives they really connect and care for each other.
The amount of emotion that pours from those pages as they fight for each other and for the betterment of their worlds is heart wrenching. This novels has just about everything you can want in a novel. Their magic, heart ache, lower and upper class turmoil, dark hidden secrets and of course some sweet romance. Make sure to check out this novel in February 2020.
