If you are seeing lots of videos and getting lots of recommendations for Manacled recently– you are not alone! I saw this video a month ago and immediately added Manacled to my “to read list”. However, what I didn’t initially catch is that Manacled is not a formally published book. It is fan-fiction published to Archive of Our Own. For that reason, it is free to read, but if you want to read it on your phone or Kindle (Kindle paperwhite girls RISE UP!), it’s not as easy as buying it off the Kindle store. It takes a little bit of a process (not hard!!), so I’m going to give you a step-by-step of how to download it to your Kindle. Manacled is a really great read, and in this post, I’m going to give a spoiler-free Manacled review, info on the book, how to read it on Kindle etc. first. It will become really clear (I’ll have it in HUGE font) when we get to the point where there are only spoilers ahead and you should proceed with caution.
@proftoddreads This book is my Roman Empire. #booktok #booktoker #booktok2023 #bookish #booktokhumor #reader #readers #readerproblems #readertok #readerthings #booksbooksbooks #bookhaul #bookworm #bookreview #bookreviews #bookreviewer #bookrec #bookrecs #bookrecommendation #bookrecommendations #bestbookoftheyear #manacled #manacledfanfic #dramione #dramionetok #dramionefanfiction ♬ original sound – Prof. Todd
Hermione Granger has survived the war, but all of her friends are dead, including Harry Potter. Voldemort reigns over the magical world. Because so many magical beings were lost on both sides of the war, in order to strengthen the numbers, Voldemort creates a re-population program. Hermione is found to have Order secrets and intelligence locked away by magic in her mind, so she is sent to be a surrogate slave for the High Reeve until they can access her memories.
Manacled has multiple dark themes. Rape and non-consensual sex are a significant and ongoing aspect of the plot. There are also character deaths, psychological trauma, gore, war violence, and torture.
Yes and no. I have only ever read the first book: Harry Potter and the Sorcer’s Stone, and I was able to follow most things. I had to look up a couple of things in the beginning (the Harry Potter wiki became my bff), but because I had the bare basics of the Harry Potter Universe from book 1, I was able to use context for most things. If you’ve never read ANY of the Harry Potter books, I think you should at least read book 1 (or watch the movies!) first before reading Manacled. Otherwise, you’re probably going to be hella lost.
This story diverges following the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is the 5th book of the Harry Potter series. A lot of people say that you should read up through that book before reading Manacled, but like I said, I’ve only ever read the first book of the series so I knew enough to understand. You may be a bit lost on what the order of the phoenix is and what the war is about if you haven’t read through the 5th book, but there’s enough context in the book that I was able to figure it out without having done so.
It’s so funny because I was NOT into Fantasy/Rom-antacy for a long time, but that has drastically changed in the past couple years thanks to ACOTAR/ Cresent City / Fourth Wing lol One of these days I am going to read the rest of the Harry Potter series, but I wholeheartedly believe that I did not miss anything in this book by not reading up through Order of the Phoenix prior to reading Manacled.
Manacled is over 370,000 words long. When I started this, I had zero frame of reference of how long that was, because it’s not an actual book, so there are no page numbers to base things from. It wasn’t until I had been reading for a few days and was only 15-20% through that I thought “uh-oh this is probably going to be the longest thing I’ve ever read“. Most books that are about 100,000 words are roughly 300-ish pages. I tried to think of other really long books to compare it too. I read 11/22/1963 by Stephen King a few years ago and at the time that felt like the longest book in the world. After looking into it, 11/22/1963 is 849 pages long and it is 269,543 words. So just a guesstimate, depending on font size/spacing/etc. Manacled would be likely over 1,000 pages (more like 1,100 if we are using the estimate of 300 pages per 100k words).
Note: I did this on my iPhone to get it onto my Kindle, but it will be a similar process if you are downloading/sending it from a different device. You will need the Kindle app already downloaded on your phone and be logged into the same account as the account on your Kindle.
Step 1: Go to Archive of Our Own (the website where Manacled was published)
Manacled (370515 words) by senlinyuHarry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.
Illustrated by Avendell.
Step 2: Click the download button and then select epub
Step 3: Go to your downloads (I did this on my iPhone but it should work similarly on any device)
Step 4: Click on this magnifying glass next to the download of Manacled
Step 5: It will bring you to the Files app where you can hold down on the Manacled file to get this pop-up. You then want to click “Share“
Step 6: This will be the next pop-up. If you want to read Manacled on your iPad or iPhone, you can click Books to have it downloaded to that app. If you want it on your kindle, you will need to scroll those icons to the right.
Step 7: You’ll scroll all the way to the right to get to “more” and click on that
Step 8: Choose Kindle from the set of options
Step 9: Send to your kindle and make sure the add to library is checked. It should then be sent to your Kindle within a few minutes!
@bookishwbomberry Replying to @bethany🕊🍃 hopefully this helps 🫶 #booktokfyp#manacled#dramoinefanfic#bookgirlies#bookobsessed#kindle#romancebooktok#bookfyp ♬ Storytelling – Adriel
Now, please don’t twist any criticism in this review of Manacled the wrong way. Because I GREATLY enjoyed reading this book! Please don’t think that any criticism that I have takes away from how much I enjoyed it. HOWEVER! Do I think that people are giving the author a bit too much credit? Maybe? Here’s the thing: it’s fan fiction. That alone means that it is building off of already established characters, timeline, places, things, ideas. Therefore a huge part of the world building was already done for this book. I saw several comments of people saying “she should just change the names and publish this!“, but I think people are forgetting how many various aspects were already established in their knowledge of the back story from the Harry Potter Universe that would need to be recreated, added, and/or changed.
Also again, it’s fan fiction and not an actual piece of published work. She didn’t have an editor considering there are numerous grammatical mistakes. She also was very heavily inspired from The Handmaid’s Tale by The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, so a lot of aspects– things from the concept of a breeding program to the clothes that they wear, were all stripped from The Handmaid’s Tale.
I’m not saying this to be critical of the author– she wrote this with the intention of being fan fiction– not winning a Pulitzer Prize, so that was why I didn’t hold the fact that the world building was almost completely done for her by the Harry Potter series. She also does a lot of world building herself regarding the war, so I don’t want to minimize that.
4.5/5 stars
I’m giving this score disregarding the fact the parts that relied on another author’s series (again– not a bad thing– it’s fan fiction!) and that were VERY heavily inspired by another (still not a bad thing– Handmaid’s Tale is a great book!). I’m just saying this so it’s clear that my rating is not based in originality. This is a score solely based on how much I enjoyed reading it, how much I thought about it when I wasn’t, if the book has stuck with me, how the characters/concepts/ideas affected me, etc.
This book gave me pits in my stomach, it felt so emotionally deep and real, and the characters were really well developed. My biggest thing is that I LOVED Hermione’s character. She was strong but broken and clever but not annoying (most of the time lol).
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Me trying to write this plot summary within 24 hours of finishing Manacled lol:
@itsharmonyvslife I dunno man but it was GOOOOD #booktok #bookishhumor ♬ original sound – harmony
Hermione Granger has survived the war, but all of her friends are dead, including Harry Potter. Voldemort reigns over the magical world. Because so many magical beings were lost on both sides of the war, in order to strengthen the numbers, Voldemort creates a re-population program. Hermione has been locked away in a prison for over a year, forgotten, and when examined is found to have Order secrets and intelligence locked away by magic in her mind. She is sent to be a surrogate slave for the High Reeve until they can access her memories. Voldemort and his Death Eaters also hope and believe that if Hermione gets pregnant with the High Reeve’s heir, that a magical pregnancy will help to unlock the magic guarding her memories.
Upon arriving at the High Reeve’s she comes to realize that the High Reeve is Draco Malfoy. There are manacles put on Hermione that make her obedient, unable to use magic, unable to fight, traceable by Draco, and unable to hurt herself. Hermione was a healer in the war and trying to process the trauma she endured while healing the dying, is extremely painful to grapple with. After spending so much time in solitary confinement, Hermione has developed agoraphobia and also is processing that the killer of most of her friends and fellow members of the Order of the Phoenix is now her master. Plus Draco and Voldemort frequently use legilimency (mind reading) on her to attempt to access her locked away memories which feels torturous to Hermione.
Hermione is constantly trying to figure Draco out. There are some things about him that don’t seem to add up with the death eater narrative or how he treats her. She still hates him, but she begins to believe that there is something else going on. Voldemort forces him to rape Hermione several times a month in order to produce an heir for the re-population program.
After several months, Hermione becomes pregnant, and after a month or so, all of her memories start to come back. At this point (after Chapter 25), it switches solely to Flashbacks for 38 chapters. You learn more about the war and more about how Hermione was pushing for the Order to use Dark Magic in order to fight back against Voldemort’s army. However, Harry Potter believed that the war could be won without evil and didn’t want Dark Magic corrupting any of his friends, so he rejected the idea. Therefore, the Order was slowly losing the war against Voldemort and more and more of the Resistance fighters were dying. Eventually, one of the leaders of the resistance comes to Hermione in secret and tells her that Draco Malfoy is bargaining with the Order to be a double agent. He is willing to provide them with information under two conditions: he receives a pardon and he gets Hermione. He explains that Draco said he was very curious about Hermione and that he wants her now and after the war. Hermione knows that this is bad, but is willing to sacrifice herself for the Order and a way to gather intelligence from one of Voldemort’s generals.
Once she meets Draco, he is as cold as she remembered him from school, but he doesn’t hurt her or violate her. He is arrogant and cruel to her but he ends up teaching her occlumency (how to compartmentalize memories and information and also how to hide those memories/information when undergoing legilimency) and how to duel. Thinking that Draco has romantic interest or an attraction to her, Hermione decides to try to build a connection with Draco so that she can ensure that he remains loyal to the resistance and so that they can control him. Every time it feels like she takes steps forward in getting close to him, he starts to shut her out and becomes cold again.
At one point, Draco gives vital intelligence about a prison that holds Resistance fighters and when they would be most vulnerable so that the Resistance can stage a rescue mission. Hermione takes the information and gives it to the Order, naive about how such a rescue mission would reflect on Draco since he is one of Voldemort’s top generals. Draco is punished for leaving the prison vulnerable to a rescue mission and Voldemort carves runes into Draco’s back with dark magic that will eventually kill Draco. These runes make him more cunning, driven to succeed, and unyielding and are very heavy with corrupting Dark Magic. When Hermione sees Draco again, she feels enormous guilt for not realizing how acting upon the intelligence would get Draco killed and heals them the best she can, even sacrificing a rare magical artifact to keep the dark magic from corrupting his soul and body.
This healing ends up being a turning point for Hermione, where she realizes that there is something deeper to Draco and the emotional connection she tried to forge for the sake of the Resistance is actually turning into a real one.
Eventually, Hermione breaks through Draco’s walls and gets him to admit that he has developed real feelings for her. He knew all along that Hermione would try to (essentially) seduce him in order to have control over him for the sake of the Order and intelligence, but given his real feelings and possessive nature, its hurtful that she succeeded.
“You know, I used to think the circumstances of my servitude to the Dark Lord were as cruel an enslavement as anyone could conceive. But I admit, it pales somewhat beside you.” … “I suppose no one realizes how light one set of manacles is until they have two,” he said
Manacled, Flashback 26, Location 10951 and 10953
You come to realize that Draco’s reason for helping the Resistance was wanting to avenge his mother’s death by Voldemort. The only option he was essentially given to protect his mother was to take the Dark Mark and become a Death Eater for Voldemort. He couldn’t retaliate while his mother was alive, because then Voldemort would torture his mother, so when she died, after everything that Voldemort put her through, he used helping the resistance/Order as penance. He felt like he had to wait after her death as to not raise any red flags that he was the spy within the Death Eaters so he needed to come up with an “explanation” as to why he was helping them so that they would trust him. So he asked for a pardon (Even though he knew he would never need it because the Order would never win). He knew he needed a consistent contact within the order to relay information to and felt like choosing a girl who he could pretend to have interest in would play into the narrative of him being an evil Death Eater. It also worked out, because he was still so bitter to Harry Potter, so choosing Hermione felt like he was making him suffer.
“I wanted to avenge my mother. I was perfectly willing to die in the process” … “Unfortunately, by the time I had an opportunity to offer my services, she had been dead too long. It wasn’t a ‘plausible’ explanation.” … “Since that wasn’t a plausible reason, I had to come up with something I’d ostensibly want from the Order. So—a pardon. But I knew that would hardly be believable either. I knew I’d need a contact; choosing a girl and acting like I had some sort of interest seemed like a pragmatic solution. A way to play into the Death Eater narrative.” He gave a thin smile. “But most witches in the Resistance were too much of a risk; hot-headed and out in the field so often there was a good chance they’d get picked up in a skirmish, and I’d either get my cover blown or I’d be cycling through contacts constantly.” He swallowed and his mouth twisted. “Then I remembered you. I thought for years that you’d died, but Snape reported you were the Order’s healer. When you occurred to me, I thought I’d found the perfect solution. You were kept in safe houses; there wouldn’t be much risk of you being picked up or killed, and you were pragmatic enough that you’d go along if you thought you were saving your friends. It seemed like the perfect solution. When I said my terms were you and a pardon, they immediately bought it. Apparently the ‘now and after war’ line was absurd enough that you all found it believable.” … “After she [his mother] died, I was being watched. The Dark Lord isn’t a fool, he knew I’d waver after losing her. I had to re-earn his trust before I could risk doing anything.
Manacled, Flashback 23
Hermione and Draco continue to forge a relationship, and Draco becomes increasingly possessive over Hermione. They work together to locate and destroy horcruxes, which they realize Voldemort has utilized to become immortal. They determine that if they can destroy all of the horcruxes, that Voldemort may just die. As the war seems to be coming to a head, Draco really wants Hermione to be extra careful, not leaving safe houses (however, this wish is often not granted by Hermione and she finds herself in trouble). This really comes to a climax when they realize there is an opportunity to strike Hogwarts and potentially have Harry battle Voldemort. Harry has been getting increasingly troubled with having Voldemort in his dreams and talking to him. Hermione creates a bomb to wipe out some of Voldemort’s wards and the enemies magic, and the Resistance fighters head there. Once the Resistance fighter’s have left, Hermione makes a realization that the issue that Harry is having is that there is a piece of Voldemort’s soul within Harry– making Harry a horcrux. Hermione rushes to the battlefield to tell Harry, and when Harry finds out, he concludes that he has to die in order to kill Voldemort.
There’s—there’s a piece of Tom’s soul inside you.” Harry’s jaw went slack, and he turned grey as he continued to stare at the projection in front of him. Hermione swallowed, and her jaw trembled. She twisted her wand in her hands with shaking fingers. “The—the soul gets torn when the Killing Curse is used. Because of the way the curse backfired when you were a baby, a piece must have gotten severed. Normally it would be placed inside an object—but if it was just left there—it must have latched itself onto the only living thing there and tried to integrate itself with you.”
Hermione, Manacled, Flashback 36, Location 13639
‘Neither can live while the other survives.’ I should have guessed.”
Harry Potter, Manacled, Flashback 36, Location 13651
Voldemort kills Harry (which weakens Voldemort but does not outright kill him) and most of the other resistance fighters are also caught. Hermione starts to make it away before Draco finds her and takes her back to the safe house they had been meeting in. Once he heals her, she tells him that Harry made her promise that she would take care of Ginny and her unborn baby (Harry’s child). Draco wants Hermione to get out of Europe now, but she refuses without Ginny. He tells her that Ginny is located at a lab in Sussex and makes her promise that if he brings back Ginny to her, that Hermione will get out of Europe. She promises and he brings Ginny back. Once again, Hermione does not realize what this decision will cost Draco and when he brings her back, he tells her that in order to save Ginny, he blew his cover as a spy and is going to be killed by Voldemort. She freaks out and while he is transporting Ginny to a new safe house, she goes to the lab where he rescued Ginny and blows it up with bombs in an effort to destroy any record of Draco being there and save him.
She tries to make it back, but gets captured and thrown in prison. Right before manacles are placed on her (to prevent her from using magic) she uses her occlumency to push away all memories of Draco. That way, if/when Voldemort begins using legilimency to search her mind, she will be able to protect Draco and not reveal him as a double agent. After she uses occlumency to hide these memories, manacles are placed on her that prevent her from using further magic and further occlumency. This locks the memories from being accessed by Hermione as well. She is thrown in a dark, isolated cell for over a year until we catch up to the events at the beginning of the book.
At this point, the book shifts back to Hermione as a surrogate as she starts absorbing all of her forgotten memories. She suddenly has to grapple with her feelings for Draco, the relationship they had, the way that he has protected her, but also the fact that he raped her and she is now pregnant with his child.
But he’d hurt her. He’d raped her. He’d told her he didn’t want her; that he couldn’t wait to kill her. … He’d dragged her before Voldemort and held her in place while her mind was torn to pieces and then left her lying on the floor in a pool of rotting unicorn blood.
Manacled, Chapter 64, Location 14631 and Location 14642
She realizes that he had to treat her with callousness and rape her, because otherwise, Voldemort would know that Draco was treating her with kindness and become suspicious whenever Voldemort regularly performed legilimency on Hermione. As she begins to face these things, she trusts Draco more and he admits to her that he has been planning an escape route for her asap. She realizes, once again, that Draco is trying to save her but sacrifice himself to death in order to do so. In order for her to escape, Draco will have to cut off her manacles (which will alert Voldemort) and while he may be able to get her out, Voldemort will kill Draco to punish him. And Draco cannot fight back because of his Dark Mark. Hermione begins researching ways to remove the Dark Mark and discovers the missing piece she needs are Phoenix tears which are incredibly rare.
Meanwhile, Draco’s father, Lucius has been tasked with figuring out Hermione’s hidden memories, as the consequence of not doing so will result in Draco’s death. He kidnaps Hermione and uses legilimency to try to figure out what Order secrets she has hiding in her mind. The secrets he finds (since they have been unlocked at this point) are that Draco was being a double agent against Voldemort because of the torture that Voldemort had put his mother through, and that he loves Hermione. Lucius recoils to this betrayal by his son but reacts biggest to the knowledge that Voldemort had tortured his wife, Narcissa, without his knowledge. Draco swoops in to save Hermione and locks up his father. When Lucius realizes that Hermione is trying to save his son and that she needs Phoenix tears, he gives them to her. Very quickly because they realize all of it has to be done before Voldemort realizes: Draco removes Hermione’s manacles, Hermione has to amputate off Draco’s arm to remove the Dark Mark, and then Draco takes the potion with Phoenix tears so that he can be free of his Dark Mark. They escape Britain while Lucius kills himself but stages it as a murder-suicide by fire to make it appear that he, Draco, and Hermione are all dead so that no one will go looking for them.
Draco takes them to a safe house in Japan where he has been hiding Ginny and her son (Harry Potter’s son), James, all these years. In the epilogue, after settling into their new home, eventually Hermione gives birth to their daughter, Aurora. After some initial hesitation, Draco falls equally in love with their daughter. Hermione peruses passions and interests that she had always wanted to do like research. Once Voldemort naturally weakens, the International Federation steps in and starts holding war trials. Ginny decides to go and step in and be an advocate for the girls who were surrogates under Voldemort’s regime. She ends up killing Voldemort herself.
Due to the trauma that Hermione endured and the issues that legilimency by Lucius caused, plus the war crimes that Draco committed, they can never been seen in public again. They live their lives quietly on their island in Japan and let the public believe that they died.
In the last epilogue chapter, Aurora is grown up and has just gotten a job at Gringott’s. She has to live with secrets in order to protect her parents and is best friends with James Potter (Ginny and Harry’s son). Since they grew up together in the house in Japan, he is the only other person who knows who knows the truth about her parents. History books write about how evil her father is and portray her mother as insignificant.
Overall, I really really really enjoyed Manacled. But I feel like I have to give it a certain level of grace because it is fan-fiction and not an actual published book. It feels fair to not hold it to the exact same standards as other books I’ve reviewed here because this one is fan-fiction.
I was constantly thinking about this book during waking hours of the day when I wasn’t reading it and it’s on my mind constantly since finishing it.
It is very dark and very intense, but I really enjoy a dystopian story, and this one took a lot of the elements of dystopian novels that I love and mixed them in. It’s a very emotional story too that sucks you in. Hermione becoming increasingly more isolated and having the life sucked out of her from the war is so gradual through the story, but feels so realistic of how one slowly wears down from trauma. It was a tragic additional story line of seeing her friendships fall apart, specifically with Harry and Ron, as they fight over what will win the war: love or logic.
I figured from the beginning that Hermione and Draco were going to end up together as it is hard to avoid seeing the tagging of this being a “Hermione and Draco fan-fiction”, but after he raped her the first few times, I was explaining the book to my husband and said “I’m assuming they are ending up together, but I cannot fathom how they overcome rape”. And honestly, I am still trying to wrap my head around it. But I suppose that is how the author wanted to make us feel.
This is my logical brain speaking, but I did feel like the book was lacking a bit was the “why” of Draco falling in love with Hermione and vice versa in the beginning. For a good portion of the flashbacks, it felt a lot like they were choosing each other because they were lacking other options. They were both isolated and craving connection. I kept waiting for him to admit the the traits he loved about Hermione (like her caring, her courage, her sacrifice), but instead he always seemed to criticizes her for it. And it was something that she flashes back to.
No, the thing that’s eating you isn’t surviving; it’s the isolation. Poor little healer, with no one to take care of. No one who needs you. Or wants you.”
Draco, Manacled, Chapter 24, Location 4641
That line above is a line that she flashes back to in Chapter 65 and Chapter 70, after her memories come back. I understand that Draco said that line initially in Chapter 24 when he was feigning more callousness for the sake of keeping up a ruse for Voldemort; however, it’s not necessarily wrong. She was obsessed with taking care of Draco and vice-versa.
Where I had the biggest issues was the length of the epilogue was a bit long. I understand where the author wanted to tie up lose ends, but it was getting a little wordy. I think most of the loose ends could have been tied up with it just flashing to the future and it being from Aurora’s POV and getting bits of information about how things ended up from her (like how Ginny defeated Voldemort and that her parents live quietly and happily in obscurity in Japan). We didn’t need a whole chapter dedicated about the minutia of how Hermione and Draco live their quiet lives.
That being said: the last line is gutting.
They hurried back to the front of the bookstore, leaving the history book behind, still open to the page with the photograph. The photo caption read: “The Hogwarts Trio, Christmas 2002. Harry Potter with friends Ron Weasley (See: Weasley, Ron, chapter 7) and Muggle-born witch, Hermione Granger. Granger left England at the start of the second Wizarding War to study healing abroad. She survived the war but died during imprisonment while a surrogate in the Repopulation Program. She was a non-active member of the Order of the Phoenix and did not fight.”
Manacled, Epilogue 3, Location 19270
After everything that Hermione sacrificed for the Order and the war, the trauma she endured as a healer, to be written down as someone who did not fight and was a non-active member of the order is so sad. But so it is for a lot of hidden heroes–many of whom are women. They aren’t the flashy face of a revolution like Harry Potter was, but are the ones who are forgotten and sometimes suffer the most.
Have you read Manacled yet? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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