Posted by I had thought this was going to be a fairly straightforward book when I first opened it. It had a coming-of-age feel with a young character named Derrius who’s being told by his father all about a certain mage college and who gets to go and what kinds of magic there are, yada yada. However, there are like eight or ten different POVs here and it gets more complex than I had been anticipating. This is more of an epic fantasy in scale and scope than it is an intimate coming-of-age story that we get with Wickwire Watch.
The first couple points of view we get are from Derrius and Orimund. Orimund is about to be given his powers at 13 years old, and so is Derrius. Both of them want to become mages, but one of them, Orimund, is expected for greatness. His parents are a high-powered pair of mages from different disciplines and people naturally assume that he’s going to be a big shot. Is it turns out, during his ceremony, it’s discovered that he has no magic at all. He gets branded with a “void” brand which will cause him to a social pariah for the rest of his life. His father disowns him, he runs away from home, and shit’s just fucked for him for a while.
The other character, Derrius, is also a 13-year-old kid and he misses his “one chance” to get assigned a magic sign and color. Basically, when you turn 13 years old you go get tested, but you can ONLY get tested on that one day. So, when he has to make a choice to save his father or go get tested, he saves his father and thinks he’s given up his one chance to become a mage. However, the archmage of the school gives him a second chance and tells him to come back in a year (this archmage is also a POV).
We start to get more and more POVs from the various characters that surround these two boys, Derrius and Orimund so they feel the most central to the plot but there are a bunch of side characters. Honestly, things really started to get muddy for me here. The majority of these characters are 13-15 years old and they all sound very, very similar to one another. I would often times get lost in who’s chapters I was in. They all had very similar traits, motivations, and tone to their chapters so it became pretty difficult to tell who I was reading about unless there was clear context. They also just keep coming with more POVs being added pretty late in the book with several hundred pages already committed to other characters.
The world-building was probably my favorite part of the book. It’s based around elemental type magic so people can manipulate air, earth, fire, water, etc, but also the mind and other things. There are a lot of different things you can do with each of them like metalwork if you’re an earth mage, levitation if you’re an air mage, etc.
The pacing was really slow for me for the first half of the book. There was a ton of foundation being laid and there were more and more points of view being added so it slowed everything down. It took a while for the larger plot of the book to start to get going as well. I knew what each individual person was doing, but the connection between them and the overarching plotline wasn’t clear for a while. The narrative writing itself was fine, but I didn’t totally jive with it as a personal taste thing. I tend to prefer a more modern tone and dialogue style, but this was a more old-school classic feeling. There was a lot of infodumping, though. I know that a lot of these characters were kids and they needed things explained, but I feel like some of the exposition was for things they should have known or at least been vaguely familiar with since it was integral to their world and life — it felt pushed in for the reader’s benefit. The world-building is expansive, so for those who want sprawling worlds with a lot of threads, this could be for you.
Overall, I think I wasn’t the right audience for this book and I have several nitpicks with it, however, there’s an audience for it. I think it’ll be for those who like coming-of-age fantasies, but don’t want a single pov, easy-to-follow plotline, and instead want something more complicated.
SPFBO SCORE: 6.5/10