In The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo sheds the trappings of her more familiar fantasy worlds to conjure a lush, morally fraught vision of 16th-century Spain—one not drawn in myth but in the textured grain of political decay, religious terror, and the quiet defiance of the marginalized. While rooted in history, the novel breathes with the intensity of a fable, where miracles cost more than they offer, and magic is neither salvation nor wonder, but a dangerous commodity.
At the novel’s heart is Luzia Cotado, a scullion hidden in the smoke and grease of a Madrid kitchen, unremarkable in station but marked in blood. Her Jewish heritage, long concealed, is already a risk in a country where the Inquisition hunts relentlessly. When scraps of miracle-working—small, inexplicable gestures—begin to slip from her hands, they don’t offer deliverance. They invite exposure. And in a city teeming with superstition, rumor, and imperial ambition, attention can be a death sentence.
What begins as a petty scheme—her mistress using Luzia’s gifts to curry favor—unfolds into a chilling entanglement with Antonio Pérez, a disgraced political schemer who sees in Luzia the means to reclaim influence with a monarch grasping at mysticism after military ruin. Power, in Bardugo’s Madrid, is elusive and corrupted. Nobility schemes while hunger festers beneath silk. Knowledge is suspect. Literacy itself is a threat. In such a world, Luzia’s quiet intelligence becomes her sharpest tool, though never a guarantee of safety.
Bardugo writes with a lyricism tempered by precision. Her language refuses ornament for ornament’s sake; it cuts through the perfumed rot of empire. Luzia is not a chosen one, nor is she an innocent. She is afraid, calculating, and occasionally reckless. She survives not through destiny, but through stubbornness—a refusal to vanish. Her resistance is not loud but persistent: a decision, again and again, to exist on her terms.
The novel’s great tension lies not only in its plot, though it twists with satisfying menace, but in the moral friction it sustains. Luzia is both a miracle worker and a fraud, a victim and an agent. Those who seek to control her are neither wholly evil nor entirely rational. Even Pérez, driven by a corrosive need to reclaim political favor, operates in the vacuum left by a crumbling empire. Bardugo avoids caricature, choosing instead to illuminate the ways power distorts every relationship it touches.
Then there is Guillén Santángel, the familiar of the title—an immortal bound to human service, steeped in bitterness, neither savior nor companion. His presence introduces a thread of the uncanny, but even he is stripped of the grandeur usually reserved for magical beings. He is tired, cynical, and dangerous in his own right, and yet, like Luzia, burdened by memory and exile. Their uneasy alliance is one of mutual recognition: not trust, but a reluctant sense of kinship between those the world has deemed expendable.
The familiar magic at the book’s core—performed in whispers, shadows, and doubt—never overwhelms the narrative’s emotional truth. It serves instead as a metaphor and magnifier of persecution, of ambition, of the lies people tell themselves to survive. Bardugo does not seek to dazzle with spectacle. Her miracles are ambiguous, fleeting, and often suspect. And that, too, is the point. This is not a story about transcendence. It’s about endurance. About how, in a society designed to erase you, survival becomes a form of rebellion.
By the novel’s end, Luzia has changed—not through triumph, but through persistence. She has not risen above her world so much as carved out space within it. What The Familiar offers is not catharsis, but reckoning. Bardugo has crafted a tale that resists the easy comfort of genre, choosing instead to explore how faith, fear, and resilience intersect in the lives of those history tries to forget. It is a story not only of power but of the cost of holding it in trembling hands. And in that trembling, there is something enduringly human.
About the author
Leigh Bardugo is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House and the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series), which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology, and much more. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.
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