Alchemised by SenLinYu: A Book Review

One thousand and twenty-four pages. Thirteen days. A love story I was told was all-consuming, and a world I was told was unforgettable. I wanted to believe both of those things. I mostly didn’t.

Synopsis

Alchemised is the debut novel of SenLinYu, published in September 2025. Set in the war-torn world of Paladia, Helena Marino is a prisoner of both war and her own fractured mind. Once a promising alchemist within the Resistance, she now finds herself in the hands of the High Reeve, Kaine Ferron, Paladia’s most feared necromancer, tasked with uncovering the memories she has lost and the secrets they may conceal. As Helena fights to protect what remains of herself, the line between captor and ally begins to blur.

It is a standalone dark fantasy with an enemies-to-lovers romance at its centre, and it sold over 300,000 copies in its first week of publication, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

As seems to be the trend at the moment, SenLinYu says they writing the novel in the Notes app on their phone during their baby’s nap time.

In the book’s Author bio, SenLinYu’s pronouns are they, so I’ll use that here.

My review

I want to start with something worth knowing about this book before I get into my own experience of it, because context matters here. SenLinYu’s online works have been downloaded over twenty million times and translated into twenty-three languages. Alchemised broke debut fiction records in its first week. It has over 118,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads. I mention all of this not to excuse what follows, but to acknowledge that this book is clearly doing something that resonates deeply with a very large number of people. I am not one of them. That is at least partly a question of taste, and I want to be honest about that.

I went into this REALLY wanting to like this book. This was not a Kindle version, or audio. I physically held and read a 1,000+ page paperback. It was so heavy, that I either had to read it at a table or use my legs. 

I should also mention, because I find it genuinely interesting, that SenLinYu wrote this in the Notes app on their phone during their baby’s nap time. This is the second book I have read recently that claimed the same origin story. Marcus Kliewer said the same about We Used to Live Here. I don’t know what this says about Notes app productivity, except that my own Notes app has yet to produce anything resembling a New York Times bestseller.

The world of Paladia is genuinely well constructed. The magic system, alchemy and necromancy as parallel forces, one preserving and one corrupting, is clever, and SenLinYu has clearly thought carefully about how these systems interact with the political and moral landscape of the story.

The world-building is the book’s strongest asset.

But. Here is the numbered list of reasons I found this book, ultimately, uncompelling.

1. The overuse of lazy adverbs

The prose is laden with adverbs that do the work that stronger verbs should do. “She said sharply.” “Helen swallowed bitterly.” “The question was enunciated slowly.” “She peered probingly.” These are not stylistic choices, they are shortcuts. Below is an example from the text where a single page is peppered with them.

As Stephen King says, the road to hell is paved with adverbs. 

2. Too much telling, not enough showing

The narration frequently tells us how characters feel rather than trusting the prose to convey it. This is particularly acute in the romance, but it runs throughout.

Here’s an example where the description is so weak that the author has to tell us. “He was different. Older. He wasn’t old, but his eyes had a look as if it had been decades since she’d last seen him.”

3. A love story that never ramped up

This is the central problem for me. Helena and Ferron’s romance is, by most accounts, the heart of the book. Readers who love this novel cite it as one of the greatest slow-burn romances they have ever encountered. I did not feel it.

There is no banter between them. There is very little physical proximity that builds in any meaningful way. Ferron is aggressive and brutal for large portions of their interactions. And then, at a certain point, he is in love with her. We are told this. The signs are there in retrospect, but they are faint, and without access to Ferron’s point of view, the shift reads as a pivot rather than a progression. We are asked to take the author’s word for it. I found I couldn’t.

The dialogue between them does not seal the deal either. The author, or fans of this book might believe it to be a great representative of love during times of war, but I would direct you to Atonement or In Memoriam, both of which convey the aching weight of lovers separated by war across far fewer pages than SenLinYu takes to establish that these two people are even drawn to each other.

4. Pain and injury are so frequent that nothing lands

Picture Vin Diesel and The Rock fighting in a Fast & Furious movie. You know neither one is going to die. They’re going to rough each other up, turn up with some bruises, and do it all again in the next movie. That’s what this is. 

Characters (particularly Helena and Ferron) are wounded, killed, reanimated and wounded again with such regularity that the stakes dissolve. By page 744, Ferron asks Helena how close she came to dying. 

“It’s war, Kaine. People die. Given your personal death toll, you should know that better than anyone else.”

At this point, the characters aren’t treating their own deaths as signifiant so why should I?

5. Too long

It just is. It does not need to be this long. At 1,024 pages, this book needed to earn every one of them. It does not. I forced myself to read 50 to 100 pages a day, not out of pleasure but out of obligation. The library copy had a return date. It felt like a marathon. A slog. There are sequences, including what feels like every second scene involving an interrupted almost-kiss, that could have been cut without losing anything essential. The almost-kiss tic in particular became tiresome: the tension builds, something intervenes, the moment is lost, repeat.

6. Point of view inconsistencies

The book is written in third-person limited past tense, which means we should only have access to what Helena knows, observes, and experiences. Yet there are moments where Helena knows things she could not possibly know, including, on occasion, what Ferron thinks and feels. This is not a stylistic choice. It is an inconsistency that a tighter editorial pass should have caught.

7. Repetitive phrases

“The swell between her hips” appears at least three times as a description of pregnancy. Hearts stall. Throats are seized. These phrases recur often enough to draw attention to themselves in a way that pulls me out of the narrative. I read the enormous tome reasonably quickly, so maybe reading it more slowly would prevent that.

8. Writing that needed a harder editorial pass

Two specific examples. The first is from page 698, where in the same paragraph we are told that Helena can see the hunger in Ferron’s eyes , and then that the conflict is visible in his eyes. Two consecutive eye descriptions, doing the same work, neither doing it well.

The second is from page 857.

(screenshot above)

“He was different. Older. He wasn’t old, but his eyes had a look as if it had been decades since she’d last seen him.” It reads as the author working out what she means on the page rather than having resolved it before writing. 

What I liked / what I didn’t

What I liked

The world of Paladia is impressive. The premise is strong. The themes SenLinYu wanted to explore: moral greyness in wartime, who gets to control a narrative, what love drives people to sacrifice, are worth exploring. Though I do feel the Hunger Games did this, and did this phenomenally well.

A line, on page 769: “Every line she’d once believed herself incapable of crossing, she passed over without hesitation now.” That is the book SenLinYu wanted to write. It arrives 769 pages in.

What I didn’t

Everything in the numbered list above. The prose needed a harder editorial pass. The romance needed more scaffolding. The book needed to be shorter. And the frequent, consequence-free injury and death drained the story of the stakes it needed to sustain a thousand pages of tension.

Final verdict

Alchemised is a book of genuine ambition that does not fully deliver. The world is strong. The writing, when it is not working against itself, has real moments. But the romance at the centre of the story never earned my investment, the length wore me down long before the ending arrived, and a significant number of prose-level issues suggest the book went to print before it was ready. Three stars is being generous. I am rounding up for the world-building and for that line on page 769.

I would not recommend it, except to readers who are deeply embedded in dark fantasy and have specifically heard that the romance is worth the investment. They may find something here that I didn’t. For everyone else, there are better books that cover the same ground in a quarter of the pages.