I’d been taking an unplanned break from middle grade fantasy when Ms. Fagan emailed me to ask if I’d like to review her latest book.  As I really enjoyed some of her past books, including her 2021 superhero story Nightingale and 2022 Cybils winner The Mirrorwood, I of course said yes. Still, I was a little afraid that I’d just lost my taste for my longtime favorite reading niche. I needn’t have worried! This book is a delight, including ratcheting tension and deep thoughts about the social order in a game-drive atmosphere.

A Game of Noctis
by Deva Fagan

Atheneum Books, 2024

ISBN 9781665930192

Review copy kindly sent by the author. Ebook and audiobook available from Libby.

All of her twelve years, Pia Paro has been proud to be a citizen of the beautiful city of Dantessa with its tall towers and watery streets. She loves that its society is built on games – play the games well, and even the lowliest of citizens can in theory earn their way to the top. There are games of luck, games of dexterity, and games of skill, including Pia’s favorite, Noctis (more on this soon).

A tingling swept through me, like the bubbles in the cider we used to drink on holidays. A fizzy sweetness that lifted me up, tickling my skin, almost but not quite painful.
The gamescript spiraled over me into a single bright word: WINNER! The letters burst apart in a shower of stars that transformed into segna as they fell, clinking into my outstretched hands.”

A Game of Noctis by Deva Fagan, p 31

Orphaned Pia has been raised by her grandfather, who’s taught her everything he knows of the ever-changing games. However, as his eyesight fails, he loses first his job with a high-ranking household and then more and more games, leaving him unable to afford the spectacles he’d need to win. Even worse, his player status – displayed floating in the air over people’s outstretched palms – finally sinks down to 0, so that he is removed from Dantessa and sent to another island as a lowly pawn.

Now Pia is on her own, trying to win enough games to pay the enormous ransom to get her grandfather back again – winning she also now needs for food and rent. So when a mysterious player clearly from a class above hers challenges her to the board game of Noctis – two teams with chess-like pieces, plus Death, the enemy of them both – Pia can’t refuse. And this leads her to an invitation to join a team for the annual live Game of Noctis. Here, the players are the pieces, with unpredictable magical challenges, and the role of death, rather than being an inanimate piece or stand-in human, is played by Lady Death herself, with deadly consequences for the loser.

Usually competing teams are all from the highest levels of society – but the Seafoxes are a motley bunch of players, mostly from the lower circles of the city, and all with their own intense reasons for playing. Pia’s been on the defensive since being dropped by her former best friend, the son of the wealthy man who fired her grandfather, but she will need to be close to her teammates for them to have any hope of winning. (Pia is described as pale with red hair, while her teammates and those on other teams are described with a variety of skin tones and genders, including one trans teammate.)

As they see the competition – fully funded with special tricks or “boons” that can be bought ahead of time by people who have the game credits – the Seafoxes see how very much the game is rigged against them. This leads to questioning the whole nature of the games of Dantessa. But can Pia and her team be clever enough to beat not just the opposing teams but the very Game itself?

With a setting that feels like a cross between Renaissance Venice and a video game come to life, a great surface challenge, and the shadowy puzzle of how the games work, I was drawn in right away. Pia’s first-person narration is immediate and personal. While many kids will likely want to play the games themselves, Pia’s struggles with friendship – both betrayal and building from scratch – resonate, and her team’s efforts to learn about the system will hopefully prompt some thinking about the systems we take for granted in our own world.

This would pair well with many of the books on my 12 Middle Grade Books for Fans of Role-Playing Games list, especially Frostborn by Lou Anders, which also shares a board game come to life with potentially lethal