Inked

Before I was an adult, I had a very specific type when it came to books. There had to be romance, there should be at least a little danger and mystery, and major bonus points if the fae were involved. Luckily, I grew up during the book world shaped in part by Tamora Pierce. So, finding all of those things at once in a YA book wasn’t hard.

As an adult, I’ve found myself falling to book slump after book slump. I get stuck in ruts where I can only listen to audiobooks of contemporary romance and everything else feels too hard. (After all, what if there’s not an HEA at the end? The world is too hard as it is!) Inevitably, I rely on a good ole fantasy book to retrieve me from the depths of the book groove I’ve worn myself into.

My ARC of Inked by Rachel Rener came at a perfect time. This book is doing a LOT all at once and I think it does it all pretty well. It’s part romance (with steamy, explicit scenes), part PNR cozy mystery, and part contemporary portal fantasy.

Talia is an art school drop out with a needle phobia—which is sort of a plot point and a shtick because she’s also now a tattoo artist. Which is where we find her when the story opens: tattooing a large snake on the back of a biker. It’s all going swell until she runs out of ink and dips into her missing boss’s forbidden stash. Surprise: the stash turns out to be magic and the snake comes to life, nearly ending her and her client’s lives.

This sets her off on a magical quest with a talking parrot sidekick (Biscuit!) through the fae world. Let’s focus on the Jewish of it all.

Talia is a secular Jew with a stereotypical Jewish mother. This is the part of the book I disliked the most. Her mother drops constant Yiddishisms and is always panicking. Now, I know this will ring true for some folks. For me, a person who was raised quite near to where Inked takes place as a secular Jew, it was a bit heavy-handed. 

“But all you two did was yell at each other!” 

“That’s just how Jewish people say ‘I love you.’”

Though I enjoyed other moments of explicit, slightly-over-the-top Jewish imagery when it wasn’t about her mother, like:

“I settled myself onto the foot of Zayn’s bed, eyes glued to the flickering lines of symbols and runes that definitely hadn’t been there before [it] lit up like a Hanukkah bush at the Zuckerberg mansion.”

And Talia’s identity felt real to me. She uses her own Jewish culture and context to understand the new magical world around her. And Rener uses those moments to explain more about Judaism to the (potentially not-Jewish) reader.

“The placement reminded me of a Jewish mezuzah, a religious decoration nailed inside the door frame to protect one’s home.”

Finally, I have a hair trigger for antisemitism and there were several moments I found myself holding my breath in concern for how certain aspects were going to be handled. The biggest was Talia’s “gold blood.” Even the phrase “gold blood” set off alarm bells in my head. Ultimately, while the book is premised on blood magic, it’s done carefully enough that I found myself enjoying the plot and breathing easier.

All in all, Inked was a fast-paced fun read that kept many different plates spinning in the air. I’ll be pre-ordering book 2.

I received an advance copy through BookSirens and am voluntarily writing this review.

Content notes: explicit sex, blood magic, overbearing Jewish mother, needles, violence

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