A Hundred Vicious Turns (The Broken Tower Book 1)

Overview

Rat Evans comes from one of New York's oldest magical families, but they've given up spellcasting entirely. What they can't give up is the strange geography that's followed them their whole life: doors other people can't see, hallways that lead nowhere a map would admit. When one of those doors opens onto a crumbling tower standing alone in a field, Rat realizes too late that whatever lives there noticed them right back.

Enrolling at Bellamy Arts is supposed to be an exit strategy—a way to disappear into ordinary student life and never open another passage again. That plan collapses when Harker Blakely shows up on campus. A gifted trans boy who was once Rat's nearest friend, Harker is the only other person who knows what actually happened the year before, and his arrival forces Rat to admit that the tower was never finished with them.

What follows is less a school story than a slow unraveling: old loyalties curdling into rivalry, buried family magic resurfacing, and a bond between two teenagers who used to trust each other completely now bent toward something closer to a standoff. The closer Rat gets to understanding the tower, the less control they have over what it wants from them.

Themes and Context

As the opening volume of The Broken Tower series, the novel works in the register of dark academia crossed with horror-tinged fantasy, a lane it shares with the comparisons its publisher invokes—campus settings where ambition and old grudges curdle into something dangerous. O'Brien uses that framework to center two queer protagonists, nonbinary and transgender respectively, whose identities are treated as simply who they are rather than as plot devices requiring explanation.

Underneath the magic-school trappings, the book is concerned with inheritance in a broader sense: what gets passed down through families, what a person owes to a bloodline they didn't choose, and how a friendship can curdle into rivalry when both people are carrying secrets they can't safely share. The uncanny architecture Rat perceives functions as a metaphor for the parts of the self that don't map onto the world other people see, a tension the story sustains rather than resolves quickly.

For a debut, the novel arrives already positioned within a recognizable wave of YA fantasy that pairs supernatural threat with explicitly queer coming-of-age narratives, suggesting O'Brien is writing toward an audience that expects both the genre thrills and the identity-forward storytelling as inseparable parts of the same book.

Why A Hundred Vicious Turns Has Been Challenged

A parent raising the book with a school board argued that its nonbinary and transgender main characters amount to an endorsement of gender ideology unsuitable for a school library shelf, regardless of the fantasy plot surrounding them. That complaint reflects the two broad concerns that recur in challenges to the novel, which has been contested in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog: the centrality of LGBTQ+ identity to its two leads, and the book's darker, horror-adjacent content involving supernatural threat and psychological menace.

For some challengers, it isn't any single passage that draws objection so much as the premise itself—that a story aimed at teenagers treats a nonbinary protagonist's identity as unremarkable rather than as a topic requiring commentary or caveat. Others have focused on tone, arguing that the tower's menace and the fraying, adversarial friendship at the story's center push the book past what they consider appropriate for a young-adult shelf. Defenders of the title counter that both the magical stakes and the characters' identities are handled with the same narrative seriousness applied to any coming-of-age fantasy, and that removing the book would deny readers a story that reflects experiences many teens already recognize as their own.