What I’m Reading: The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni

YA fantasy readers will know Lynette Noni from her popular fantasy series The Medoran Chronicles. I’m a big fan of the series, which ticked the box of being re-readable when I blitzed through it a second time round, and is pure imaginative fun.

When I heard of the release of The Prison Healer, I was super excited to see what Noni would do with a fantasy trilogy positioned as darker, grittier, and targeted to an older YA audience.

What is the premise of The Prison Healer?

The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Kiva, is a healer within the death prison Zalindov, where conditions are harsh and prisoners often don’t survive. Outside of the prison, a rebellion is waging, and when the Rebel Queen is captured, Kiva is tasked with keeping her alive long enough to undergo the Trial by Ordeal. When Kiva receives a message from her family outside the prison walls saying that they are coming and to keep the Rebel Queen alive, Kiva knows she must undertake the trial herself if she has any hope of saving the Rebel Queen and getting free of Zalindov.

Review

The Prison Healer certainly lived up to its promise of being darker and grittier than The Medoran Chronicles. The storytelling and writing are much tighter, and overall I found it was a much more character-driven book; we spend lots of time with Kiva’s internal thoughts. 

I think in part this has to do with the setting; the book is set entirely at Zalindov, a grey, dull, depressing prison. This suited the gritty world that Noni was trying to create, and felt very real and restrictive as it would for the characters who lived there.

But at times it felt too restrictive – one of the things I love about fantasy is experiencing the different, wondrous worlds and with this book you just don’t get that (apart from hints at the wider world). In hindsight, I also found the lack of variety in setting made it hard to recall the events of the book, unless they were key plot events. It all blends into one blur, with most of the time spent in the prison infirmary punctuated by the Trials of Ordeal.

I think certain characters were instrumental in adding a bit of lightness and variety to the story, particularly Tipp, the young boy with a stutter who helps Kiva in the infirmary. He definitely pulls at the heart strings! And Jaren, a new prisoner and slow burn love interest, adds just enough tension without overdoing it.

Who doesn’t love a map at the front of a fantasy book?!

*Spoiler Warning* I’m going to talk about the revelation-style plot next, and while I won’t go into details, I suggest if you plan on reading this book to stop here as it might give something away.

The Prison Healer is a revelation-style plot where right at the end – the very end! – we learn something about the story that completely flips things on its head. In this case, the true identity of the protagonist.

Did I see it coming? No. Do I think the author did an amazing job at pulling this off? Yes. How do I feel about it? I’m not sure.

There is a bit of the unreliable narrator to this style of ending. When I read it half of me was thinking wow, what the hell?!, while another part was thinking, Have I just been lied to? To pull off this plot revelation the reader is definitely not accessing all of the protagonist’s thoughts – and since we are so close to her otherwise it feels like a very deliberate ploy to mislead the reader in order for the big pay-off at the end.

Was the pay-off of the surprise big enough to cover for an unreliable narrator?

Yes, I think most people who read it will agree it was. 

The Prison Healer doesn’t read as a standalone, as first books of trilogies sometimes do. The pacing, I think, is more heavily weighted to the end of the book. I would find it hard to describe the story in terms of a beginning, middle and end – once you finish it, it all feels like a pre-revelation build up with a flurry of action right before the finish.

The result is a book that is absolutely set up to leave you wanting more so you can dive right into the second, which was conveniently released only a few months after the first, called The Gilded Cage.  

This is one trilogy where I’m fairly certain the second book will be even better than the first: the stakes have been raised, we know who everyone really is (I think) and we’re about to experience the rest of the fantasy world that Noni has created.

In love with fantasy trilogies? Me too! Check out my posts on the His Dark Materials trilogy and The Lady Helen trilogy.