WARNING! INEVITABLE SPOILERS BELOW!

High upon the mountain rises the citadel Civim, a city and campus of magic. It is to Civim that Emya, Evris, Felix, and Artyem venture—the girls for the first time in a leaving-of-the-nest to attend magic college, and for the men it is a long awaited return home. Though this journey is only the beginning. Most of Winding Ever Higher’s story takes place within the school itself. Though dangerous terrain and wild animals threaten the way in the beginning, the major conflict of this book is the maze of new environments and relationships which Emya must navigate, all while yet learning to let go of her trauma-induced preconceptions.

Those relationships are where this review shall begin. They are likewise where Winding and Sutphin do most of their heavy lifting. Where Twisting Every Way spent a lot of page space on the setting and strange effects of magic as well as on Emya’s internal states, Winding divides its content split mostly between Emya’s interiority and how she gets along with Evris, Felix, and now her teachers and classmates.

While Emya has recovered some from her life of disdain in her prejudicial village, she is still very slow to trust. Evris, Artyem, and Felix act as homebases for her from which she ventures out very slowly, making friends with Evris’s friends before finally making her own—and some enemies as well.

In my review of Twisting, I predicted a love-triangle dynamic among Emya, Evris, and Felix. This was only partially correct. Early in the story, Evris’s affections are directed firmly toward Artyem, leaving Felix and Emya together to bond unobstructed—at least until she learns that Felix is Master Felix to all the other students at Civim. She realizes then that he is desired by many of the young, ambitious women students, to no consequence.

Winding handles the romantic-interest component of the plot more like a female coming-of-age story than a romantic plot or subplot. Emya’s clearly reciprocated feelings toward Felix are tied-in to her ability to use magic, which is tied into her becoming her own person. Moreover, there is the complication of the companion, which creates a positive feedback loop between the two when either Emya or Felix feels a strong emotion.

All of this creates a complex and interesting dynamic, and it generates some interesting questions as well: namely, how will the two feel about each other once they are severed from the Companion? How will that affect their magics? And will there time spent connected leave permanent alterations to their personalities? What does that mean for Felix’s murky backstory? Will we discover that he was once evil but is reformed because of his time spent married—er, I mean connected to Emya? Does that mean we’ll see the classic romantic Beauty and the Beast plot type after all? Or will we be surprised again with a sharp turn in the third novella?

As you can tell, the characters are believable, and the plot itself is well structured—as a whole. And here is where Winding falls down the same hole as Twisting. The plot pacing is not of the same quality as the structure, not if this book is to be read as a novella. It isn’t really. Like Twisting before it, Winding is really a third of a story, not a single story as part of a trilogy. Because of this, the pacing starts to crawl whenever we start to read any of the world-building details. It isn’t that these details aren’t going to be relevant later. They sure seem to be set ups, but they set up something that isn’t relevant to the reader at the time of presentation. That is to say, the reader is looking for a major conflict / plot arc within the single book but can only find partial curves of the arc, which makes it more difficult to feel as invested. However, this might be better remedied by reading all the books straight through. However again, they novellas are not paced around being on long work, so this slowing effect might be made worse if the books were simply packaged together.

Really, a solution would be to edit all three together into one book, cutting certain details and making the central conflict of the whole narrative arc clearer from the beginning. This, for a third however, is too much to ask for, so I’d recommend that readers keep in mind that there is a bigger story which makes the trifles more significant.

Also similar to Twisting are the setting and prose. They are coherent and clear respectively, though neither strike as especially gripping or engaging. Given that the focus is on Emya, her maturation, and her relationship with Felix—and how that affects her coming-of-age and magical development—this isn’t really too much of a drag on the story. Most of the reader interest comes from intrigue and character dialogue, not on vivid landscape description or poetic description of action—though I will mention one disappointing scene toward the end when shadow demons attack Civim. The fighting is very vague and amounts to wizards shooting light-lasers at the beasts. It is disappointing in the same way that Hollywood’s rendition of the spells in the Harry Potter novels is. In the books, the spells are an interesting play of transmutative and constructive effects; in the films they are flashes of light—in Winding, we see the same, perhaps out of a justifiable disdain for contemporary tendencies for magic to be used to resolve conflicts (“magic-systems” are for videogames and TTRPGs, not novels). Whether that is the case or not, there was still a missed opportunity.

Overall, though, Winding Ever Higher is an improvement on its predecessor. It gets into the thick of the character relations much more quickly, and it also has many more recurring characters to make those relations more interesting and complex. And like I said, its plot generates many questions that most readers will really want answers to. That is enough to spur me to read book three, Spiraling Beyond Oblivion. Click the book cover above to order your copy and see what twists Amy Sutphin has in store for you.