Posted by We’ve got a murder in the prologue that kicks off the plot for the rest of the book. The dude who dies was a professor and was murdered because he started to figure out an ancient text that he should have left well enough alone. Naturally, his oldest and dearest friend comes and finishes him off — but his assistant gets away.
The assistant is named Summer and she’s a lower-end noble lady who’s coming of age, worried about being married off, and more interested in her studies than anything else. However, when she discovers her master dying in his room, she was given a quest and she’s taking it very seriously. He told her to go take the manuscript and deliver it the only person he trusts… problem is that person is leagues away and it’ll take weeks to get there in a best case scenario. She’s trying to get this manuscript to her master’s friend but he’s a hard one to find and she’s pretending to be a scullery maid working in his manse until he comes back from a trip abroad.
Cole is an acolyte, he has a girlfriend he’s not allowed to be with anymore since her aunt has taken over all of her communications and burns the letters he sends and kills the messenger birds. He’s been told directly that he won’t be able to court her any more but he’s determined to try and make it work somehow. He’s a mage and kind of down on his luck and then his books gets stolen which leaves him straight fucked. He’s trying to chase down this thief across the rooftops, which is stupid, and ends up reaping the fruits of his stupidity, roped into a new world of crime with this thief, trying to ‘earn’ his own books back. I do believe that Cole and Summer get the most page time and are intended to be the main characters, while Fenya and Arlan are side characters that don’t get as much time.
Fenya was my least favorite character. She went to school with Summer and was an absolute bitch for no reason. She loved making fun of Summer and making her life miserable, she gets real joy out of making others hurt. It made for an unpleasant reading experience every time she was on page, but not everyone can be a hero, I guess. She’s been tasked with figuring out what happened to the murdered dude from the prologue because right now, his assistant, Summer, is the one being pegged as a person of interest and is basically a fugitive in hiding.
There was a strong emphasis on the world building in this one and it’s all old school hand wavy/soft magic systems. We’ve got wizards who can manipulate minds, make themselves look like other people, turn their skin into iron during sword battles, there are dragons, and poisonings, and assassinations’, kings and emperors, archchancellors and wizard schools, ancient languages with words give you headaches and swim on the pages. All of the classic epic fantasy features appear here and I believe that to be a theme of my batch so far — which is totally fine. Women in this world seem to be stuck as second class citizens, they’re allowed in academia but it’s restricted. Summer is allowed in the magic academy but she’s usually separated out and attends classes with just other female acolytes with the exception of the upper most classes where there just aren’t enough people for two classes, and so men and women study together. Most of her teachers treat her differently, like she’s less-than, but some of them are okay and treat her with respect.
As far as the writing, this also had an old school feel to it rather than a more modern vernacular. This seems to be a theme of my batch so far as most or all of my books have an older more classic feel to them. As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, I tend to prefer a more modern feel over old school, but that’s a matter of taste. I don’t know why it is, but I prefer phrases like “I will” over “I shall” and “said goodbye” rather than “bade farewell.” This is very personal taste and your mileage will vary, there’s nothing wrong with the prose itself.
This was a bit long and the pacing suffered for it, at least for me and my reading experience. It’s hard to get 700+ pages into one book and have all of those pages matter to the plot or character development. There are not many books I can think of over 600 pages where I felt like the pacing was fantastic, usually there are really slow moments or possible DNF moments for me with books that chonky. This clocks in at 763 pages on Goodreads, if that’s accurate, that would equate to roughly 190,000 – 210,000 words using Google’s average word count per page estimation. This took a while to get going and it could have been a DNF if a few things hadn’t caught my attention leading me to want to know more. That said, once I got into it, I started to invest in the characters and I did make it through to the end which I rarely do with books over 600 pages. One of the things that made the pacing a little wonky for me were flashbacks that some of the characters would have but there wasn’t always a good indication that we’ve traveled back in time as readers. I’d usually catch on early if dead characters made it back on page or if there was mention of someone being significantly younger than they are in the present timeline, but it wasn’t always obvious like that. This confusion I had may be in part to how I read the book, which is text-to-speech, but I’ve peeped some reviews and there are others mentioning it as well.
Overall, I did like this book and I would recommend it to those who like lots of characters, lots of moving pieces, old school epic fantasy medieval backdrop, swords, dragons, assassinations, quests, and don’t mind big doorstopping tomes.
At the time of this review it is marked as SAFE.