Leigh Bardugo excels at going dark and The Familiar is no exception. This book covers star-crossed lovers, deadly magic, women who are treated like furniture, ghoulish magical familiars, back-stabbing, front-stabbing, and (cheers!) the Inquisition. All in 400 pages.
Where will your book club even start? With our book club questions for The Familiar of course! This discussion guide will help your book group unpack Luzia’s journey from a lowly kitchen maid doing her best to hide her Jewish ancestry, to a magical practitioner caught up in a political and religious maelstrom. We’ll help you unpack Bardugo’s plot devices and follow them to the book’s fiery conclusion.
This discussion guide for The Familiar includes 10 discussion prompts, a synopsis and some selected reviews, all designed to get the conversation started. And scroll to the bottom to get some ideas for what to read next.
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The Familiar Synopsis
(We always chose to provide the publisher synopsis because we feel that it’s worthwhile to discuss whether the official book description actually squared with your experience of the book.)
The Familiar, Leah Bardugo
In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to improve the family’s social position.
What begins as simple amusement for the nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain’s king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England’s heretic queen—and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king’s favor.
Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the lines between magic, science, and fraud are never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition’s wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive—even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santángel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both
10 Book Club Questions for The Familiar
These questions have been tailored to this book’s specific reading experience, but if you want more ideas, we also have an article with 101 generic book club questions.
- “When she’d left her parent’s home, it had been with all the pomp of a wardrobe being moved to a different wall.”
This quote is from Valentina, describing her marriage to Marius. While she begins as a piece of furniture, her story arc takes quite a turn, particularly in the final third of the book. What did you think of her evolution? Were you rooting for her? - The POVs in the book switch between characters rather than just focusing on Luzia’s POV. How does that structural decision by Bardugo add to the narrative?
- Luzia and Santángel make such an interesting and unlikely pair. Did their relationship work for you? Discuss how Bardugo used the events of the novel to bring the two characters together.
- “…every night she shuts the windows tight to guard against drafts, and every morning he dies and is reborn beside her. she reminds his heart to beat again, as she did so long ago. he kisses her fingers, and combs her hair, and he treasures her, as only a man who has lost his luck and found it once more ever can.”
And further, The Familiar pulls some big magic at the end of the book in order to save the two lovers. How did you find the ending? Was it clear and satisfying for you? Why or why not? - There are many other fantasy books featuring magical familiars. The Golden Compass, the Dresden Files series, Harry Potter, the Iron Druid series and every Aladdin retelling come to mind. How does the use of a familiar in Bardugo’s book differ from how magical companions are presented in other books and movies?
- “Luzia had always been a liar, now she was a killer”
What was Bardugo’s intent with this? What this a matter of Luzia evolving as a person. Or did she always have a dark nature which was simply revealed to us throughout the course of the book? - This book had a lot going on! Star-cross lovers, religious discrimination, political shenanigans, misogyny, servitude and a large-ish cast of characters. Too much? Just enough?
- Consider Víctor de Paredes. He’s a rich guy with a strong sense of entitlement, selective amnesia about his origin story, and a mean streak. Consider some current politicians, businessmen, religious figures and other people with money and power. Do you see some of Víctor in any of them?
- “But Doña Valentina would never have her in this house, not even the dark, hot windowless kitchen, if she detected a whiff of Jew.”
Both Luzia and Aunt Hualit/Catalina knew it would be dangerous if they gave off that whiff of Jewishness. Discuss how they each kept their secrets and how it affected their choices in life. - Valentina at the auto de fe, “After hundreds of years, if there were so many sinners left, what had the Inquisition accomplished? […] The machine had been built to consume heresy and impiety, so would it keep finding heresy and impiety to feed on?”
Indeed, the Inquisition went on for over 360 years. What do you know of the Inquisition? Can you think of other institutions that have also fed on themselves this way?
Selected Reviews for The Familiar
(Use these selected Goodreads reviews to compare with your own experience of the book. Do you agree or disagree with the reviews?)
“As a reader, I found myself thinking about my own family and friends as the story unfolded. The characters in this novel felt like some of the most three dimensional characters I’ve come across.”
“All of the side characters’ internal thoughts and feelings pop up from time to time like an annoying bug, seeming like a shallow afterthought compared to the protagonist’s, with none of it going beyond what you or the main character would assume. so why bother? […]”
“There’s something that gets me choked up about reading Jewish stories that center this particular brand of resistance: the kind that isn’t about changing the world, but is about taking care of ourselves and each other.”
“The Familiar is a perfectly adequate book. The prose is serviceable. The character motivations make sense. The historical setting is carefully rendered. In fact, had it been a debut novel written by an up-and-coming author, I would have praised its well constructed—if a little predictable—plot and overlooked the simplicity with which the themes are presented.”
Books Like The Familiar
If you loved the Spanish setting and want more of that, our list of books set in Spain has a section featuring six historical fiction novels. And for more misogyny and magic, try our discussion guide for Circe.
The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson
If you want more magic and two characters who are fleeing danger from religious and political power, this is your next book.
The Bird King is set in Granada, right as the last Sultan on the Iberian peninsula is about to get trounced by Isabel and Ferdinand’s armies. Fatima is the Sultan’s last remaining concubine and her friend Hassan is the palace mapmaker.
But Hassan doesn’t make ordinary maps. He can bend reality and make maps of places he has never seen (or that may not even exist). Using the maps, Hassan and Fatima escape the palace, seeking freedom and a safe place to land. Their love and determination play out where the fields of war are imbued with a strong dose of magical realism.
I listened to the audio version of this book while I was on a slow stroll along the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. They were on a mission and so was I, which made us perfect companions.
Chain-Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This book is not set in historical Spain, nor does it feature magic. But it does have a pair of star-cross lovers battling it out against institutionalized cruelty and greed.
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxx” Stacker, star gladiators, fight for freedom in a profit-driven prison system. One that’s not too far off from America’s own. As part of CAPE or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, prisoners compete in death matches for their release. Thuwar and Staxx, both lovers and fan favorites, navigate the challenges, but obstacles laid by CAPE’s corporate owners have devastating consequences.
Read it for book club and use our Chain Gang All-Stars discussion guide.
A Deadly Education (The Scholomance #1), Naomi Novik
If you found Santángel more than creepy and the magic a bit dark (but in a good way), then try the Scholomance series.
I’m just going to let a Goodreads reviewer tell you what this is about, because he nailed it.
“If Hogwarts was a prickly, sentient, professorless school infested with demons, and the lead was an angry, dark Queen of Sarcasm and prophesied harbinger of death, trying to study and survive…or die, you’d have this book.”
So in that world, you find El tackling issues related to her mixed ethnicity, academic politicking and some very hungry monsters. The book reads like a dark comedy with very dark magic and a sarcastic queen of a main character at the center of the action.
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