2025 Hugo Finalists: A Sorceress Comes to Call

This post is part of the series, Reading the 2025 Hugo Finalists for Best Novel, where I am reading through all the 2025 Hugo Award Finalists for best novel. These are not book reviews. Just some scant thoughts as I think through a voting order.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is a character-driven story of deception and sorcery that builds slowly as all the pieces come together for an intense and violent finale. Most of the characters are well developed, there is lots of dark humor peppered throughout, and by the end I felt invested in the outcome.

Cordelia's difficult relationship with her mother is established quickly in the first few chapters, but feels like the least developed relationship overall -- Evangeline is terrible to Cordelia and seems to see only her as an extension of herself. That doesn't change much throughout the novel. Cordelia is extensively developed through her relationships with all the other characters while Evangeline seems to remain mostly static.

Hester and Lord Evermore's romantic subplot was, by comparison, deeply complex and well developed. I often found myself more interested in the development of that relationship than what was happening with Cordelia and Evangeline, possibly just because of the slow pacing of the novel overall.

The various secondary characters were fun to read. Alice and Cordelia's relationship felt so vital to Alice's development. And Willard delivered some absolutely hilarious lines in the last stretch of the novel.

Overall, I felt left just wanting to know more; about Evangeline primarily. But also about Falada, and Hester and Lord Evermore before Cordelia came into their lives. This novel read to me like a portion of a larger work and the slow development made it hard to just sink in to and read quacky.