Hermione-Draco romance fanfic being reformatted into hotly anticipated debut novel
By Dan Selcke
Next year, author SenLinYu will release her debut novel. Called Alchemized, it's a "standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them," according to the author herself. According to publisher Penguin, the book will have a gripping enemies-to-lovers romance that is "by turns tender, toxic and all-consuming."
Alchemized is already one of the most hotly anticipated books of 2025, it's part because a lot of people are already familiar with it. It began life on fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own as a Harry Potter fanfic called Manacled.
Manacled takes place in a different version of the Harry Potter universe where Voldemort has won. Harry Potter is dead and much of the wizarding population has been decimated. Hermione Granger, who has lost many of her memories, is being held prisoner by Dolores Umbridge. As part of a plan to repopulate the wizarding world, she is assigned a surrogate who ends up being Draco Malfoy. As her memories slowly return, Hermione remembers that she and Draco previously had a romance. "[Alchemized] will grapple with themes of trauma and survival, legacy, and the way that love can drive one to extreme darkness, and it is, as you may be able to tell, a reimagined version of Manacled," SenLinYu shared, according to The Daily Mail.
Manacled, which was published over the course of 2018 and 2019, was extermely popular on AO3, earning over seven million hits. It was also controversial for reasons you can probably guess by reading the description. This isn't the first time that a novel has begun life as a piece of fanfiction. The most famous example is 50 Shades of Grey by E. L. James, which started out as a piece of Twlight fanfiction that James changed around to avoid any copyright infringement. 50 Shades was a huge success that spawned a movie trilogy, so who's to say Alchemized couldn't forge a similar path?
The book is due out in the fall of 2025.
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