Finally—a worthy romance fantasy novel for women to read! After so much insanity over the Twilight series, Maria V. Snyder’s Poison Study is a breath of fresh air. While you won’t find vampires or werewolves, you will find a smoking hot assassin, a deep and calculating transgender character, witty dialogue, magic, mayhem—and best of all, a strong female lead who saves the freakin’ world. Well, the kingdom, anyway. (Spoilers ahead.)

Book one of the trilogy introduces us to Yelena, the kind of female lead we can all actually respect and admire. Not only does she have strange magical powers that she doesn’t understand; she also has a history of killing a man—for a mysterious reason—and the guts to survive in a world that obviously doesn’t want her to live. When she’s about to be hanged—after spending a year in prison for the murder—she is offered the job of food taster for the commander of the area and accepts. Trained by the commander’s brilliant and sly assassin, she then embarks on her journey from criminal to savior.

Yelena proves to us over and over again what an amazing warrior she is. Though she does not have brute strength, she is resourceful enough to make friends with people who train her in self-defense and provide other resources for her to use. Her life is in constant danger, and while she knows this, it does not stop her from doing the right thing all along—whether it is bravely stand in a covert operation to save the commander’s life, face off against men who want to harm her, or save children from a similar fate she once faced herself.

There are a few problematic areas in the novel. After testing the commander’s brandy drinks all evening, she gets a bit tipsy and tries to seduce her trainer (who ends up being her love interest, of course). He deftly avoids her pass, and we’re left feeling a little hollow—not so much because nothing happened, but because it was she who was made to look like a fumbling drunk. Even so, the character retains her dignity, which is much more than we can say about many other heroines these days. She also appears to be a little flat sometimes. Yes, she is headstrong, brave, and mysterious, which all make her awesome; but we don’t really know much about her personality itself. She’s spent so much time as an orphan and as a prisoner, however, that perhaps she doesn’t even know many things about herself, either.

The story itself is wonderful—full of nice twists, good friends (who doesn’t love a pair of goofy yet strong knight-like guards or a woman who can handle a bo staff like nobody’s business?), and a love interest that slowly develops without going over the top at all. Adventure is first and foremost in this romance, and the heroine is a real heroine—something all women can definitely enjoy.