暗黑魔法

My six-year-old has developed this very polite habit of calling things she doesn't like "not my thing." This was "not my thing." It's hard to say quite why: I like fantasy and strong female protagonists and good world building, but. Here's the good: the world building was amazing. I loved the idea of the four Londons, and it felt truly original -- each felt real and whole. Schwab really excels at invoking a feeling of a place. But. The protagonists fell flat. There was too much violence -- pretty much anyone named and not protected by plot armor died within the chapter, and when that happens it's hard to get attached. The plot felt flimsy.

Also, I know it's itself derivative to accuse a fantasy book of being a Lord of the Rings derivative, but the MacGuffin was an amazingly powerful malevolent artifact that enervated the users, but whose possession and use was addictive. Using the MacGuffin (primarily to be invisible) allowed the enemy to spy on them. The main quest was to return the MacGuffin to the place where it was made in order to destroy it.

Yeah, not my thing.

Victoria Schwab writes Adult and YA stories and while the pseudonym of "V.E. Schwab" is for adult novels I feel like A Darker Shade of Magic was a little more YA than Adult.

I liked the types of magic introduced and how the story wasn't bogged down with history of each London/worlds. The multiple cities connected together was a great concept and offered a wonderful opportunity to explore additional worlds. Schwab kept the focus small and discuss the London's and some of the properties of the world they resided in.

To me this story was a solid it was okay. I suppose I prefer my books with a bit more grit
or characters with roughness around the edges. Near the end of the book I started to wonder what else I would read and checking out of a series like that is a sign I should give up the series and move on to something else.

This is a highly reviewed book/series but it just wasn't for me.

Actually 3.5* b/c it took me two attempts to finish this one. The exposition in the beginning is just a tad too long and this is what kept me from finishing the first time. After the first third of the book the plot finally gets going ...

I really liked the premise of the different Londons and traveling between them. The world does have a lot of promise with the different cities, one with no magic, one with a lot and one with magic dying out ... and of course the one that was eaten by magic. But of all the people living in these cities only two can travel between them.

I did not like the magic system especially the way it is portrayed in Red London. It‘s all magic words and hand-wavium.



I liked the characters, Lila, Kell and even Holland. I think Lila - who wants to be a pirate - is my favorite. Holland had a lot of ambiguous potential only to loose that for the final third of the book.

I don‘t like the ease and finality with which the supporting cast is killed off. Although I am not entirely sure all of them are dead.

The showdown somehow felt a little too easy and the resolution of the McGuffin and its black magic was a little too convenient except for the part where Holland will hopefully come back to haunt everyone. I really didn‘t expect a mostly-happy ending with little to no consequences for the protagonists

The world and characters have a lot of potential and the writing is smooth, so I‘ll probably be listening to part 2/3 sometime soon. (This one I read digital)

Terrible.

Why is so much 21st century sci-fi full of innovation, while 21st century fantasy is just re-treading old tropes with generally weaker execution? I am annoyed at the fantasy authors. But of course books of every kind are written all the time. Probably there are amazing innovative fantasy novels out there. It is then the fault of readers and reviewers who rate the boring writing highly, that someone guided by public opinion, like myself, will never come across the good stuff.

(For reference examples of innovative sci-fi: [b:Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628], [b:The Quantum Thief|7562764|The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)|Hannu Rajaniemi|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327950631s/7562764.jpg|9886333], [b:Too Like the Lightning|26114545|Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)|Ada Palmer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443106959s/26114545.jpg|46061374]. Examples of boring fantasy: [b:The Final Empire|68428|The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)|Brandon Sanderson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480717416s/68428.jpg|66322] and this book.)

I am disappointed because I had my hopes high. Two of the good sci-fi books I listed are from women. They enter a fairly male-dominated genre, and bring new ideas. Perhaps it is harder for them to succeed as well (a long grey beard is as much correlated with popularity as good writing is), leading to the odd result that successful female writers are probably better than successful male writers are. So I thought this book would be really awesome.

I should mention some specifics regarding why I think it is in fact terrible in the end.

It is similar to fan-fiction or hobby writing in the way characters are developed. The quirky characters are introduced, and you are expected to look at them as life-long friends from the next page on. Most of the events depict them in uncharacteristic situations. I mean if you have known someone to be utterly selfish for a decade, and then they start acting all heroic and selfless, that is interesting. But if someone acts heroic and selfless throughout the entire book, but you are told that this is uncharacteristic of them, that is interesting in a very different way. The "what was the writer thinking?" way.

So the characters are bad. The world-building is practically non-existent. "Imagine a standard Victorian London, a standard fairy-tale kingdom, and a standard evil empire." There are two characters, and they are almost totally disconnected from the world. They each know like 1 other person. (Compare with Too Like The Lightning, where you could cover all four walls of your Conspiracy Theory Room with the network of connections between the dozens of truly interesting characters.)

One of the main characters, Lila, is a street urchin. No useful skills to speak of. Level 1. The other character, Kell, is a half-human half-magic super-wizard. Level 100. The adventure is sized for Kell. Accordingly, Lila cannot contribute anything, but tags along anyway.

Correction: she can swing a lead pipe, which is on par with the level 100 spells.

On one of the earliest pages we get a glimpse of Kell's power. He absent-mindedly stops the flow of the Thames for half a minute just to get a better look at its ripples. If you had to guess, whether in the next 400 pages there is going to be a situation where he solves a problem with magic, what would you say? I certainly thought there would be such a situation. Wrong!

Everybody is warded against magic, Kell is disabled one way or another, he is surprised, the opponent has a hostage, or he has a better option than using magic. He never seems to casts any spells beyond the obvious or the trivial.

The story revolves around a super-magic artifact that can do things that are impossible with magic. Even this artifact does really basic things, like creating a sword, or making you invisible, or freezing someone, or shooting daggers at a target. If these are amazing things that cannot be done with magic, what is magic actually capable of? The novel does not go into much detail on this.

Okay, bad characters, bad world-building, no ass-kicking magical action. There is a nefarious plot though. Is it any good? I will put this in a spoiler tag in case my review made you want to read the book.


The evil empire has a super-weapon. The super-magic artifact. They want to take over the fairy-tale kingdom. Both the evil empire and the fairy-tale kingdom have a super-wizard in their service. The evil queen sends a present to the fairy-tale prince. He puts it on, and now the queen controls him. So far, so good.

The other part of the plan by the king is the following. Break the super-magic artifact in two to get two weaker pieces. Still quite super. Keep one and give the other to the super-wizard of the fairy-tale kingdom. The artifact is dangerous and will infect and kill everyone and destroy the world.

Now why does the king want to destroy the world the queen has just brought under her control? And why not let your own super-wizard carry the artifact? This is actually answered in the book: this way if the artifact is discovered, they can blame the fairy-tale super-wizard.

But their own super-wizard carries the queen's present that allows her to take over the kingdom. Why does the same logic not apply there? Their super-wizard also hires mercenaries and with their help tries to kill the fairy-tale super-wizard. This fails, because he has the artifact. But what if it succeeded? Then the evil super-wizard would have the artifact. Why the assassinations if this is not their intention? If it is their intention, why not give the artifact to the evil super-wizard again?


It is just a terrible plan, and it duly falls apart. Good thing it does, because the heroes do not really manage anything beyond staying alive.

Writing-wise I have no complaints about the prose. But the plot is a mess. Examples:

Lila has lost everything she owned when her ship burned down. She has to rebuild from nothing now. But... she intentionally started the fire. She had ample opportunity to take anything from the ship. She could have even taken more than she owned.

Page 104: "It wasn't the first time Kell had killed someone." Page 143: "Kell had fought before, but never like this, never for his life." I guess he killed someone for sport the earlier time?

Page 303: "The woman moved with both jarring speed and awkward grace". I will from now on use "awkward grace" to describe my own style.

They really really hate Holland and wish him to die. Yet when Kell beats him, he suspiciously falls into a coma, and they carry him around from then on, without even worrying about tying him up or something. This is because the writer knows that the situation will change by the end of the story in an unexpected way that will suddenly make it convenient (critical even) to have Holland a little bit alive.

Wow. I walked into this without expectation--just that a few people I keep tabs on thought it was definitely worth the read. They were not wrong.

It was an easy read, but not necessarily light. It was dark, but not so grimdark as to peel the paint off the walls and it was surprising in all the ways that grip you (in the right ways.)

This is going to be a series right? Or at least a world? Right? .. Right??!?11?

The world is a stage but the spotlight was on London or the geo coordinates of what would be London in a few different/near parallel dimensions. Nice changes between each. Good lore, and backstory. Set in a bit of a Medieval period rounds out some information age lack.

I was still a bit vexed at not really knowing the depth of the world at large. When you understand that 'Black London' fell, did the world fall with it too? Was London the only place that doors were made? etc etc.. If I return my scope to the book's scope and let it take me away I didn't mind so much. I'm allowed these thoughts in the post embers of the read though.

Cunning, bewitching, cold, and hot--this book has a good deal to offer. While it tidies itself up quite nicely the bones have been laid for expansion. While the author didn't allude to it, things in motion tend to stay in motion, right? :D

Enjoy this read, but be ready for something wicked to steal your breath--and make you want more.

I've been really struggling with my reading the last couple of months and I can't figure out exactly what's gone wrong. Initially I thought the problem was too much - I read over 100 books last year; always had an audiobook going in the car or on a walk and my nose near an e-reader the rest of the time. I had set aside all of my own thoughts because I wasn't happy enough with them. Replaced them with something a little less painful.

I still think that's a part of what's wrong with my reading. But maybe a larger part is the quality of the writing and the lack of innovation. I want to read something that doesn't remind me of anything I've read before and it's so frustrating to be unable to find it. It leads me to unhappy literature and non-fiction. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," according to Tolstoy. And that fits my literary quandary, too. Light lit is all alike; dark lit provides the only opportunity for something original. (I know that's severely overstated - or hope it is, anyway.) So I get stuck with the bad divorces, the drug-addled philanderers, and the rapists and murderers of modern fiction or the light mystery that's the same as the last with a different setting and characterization.

So, I'm trying to find the good in the light, starting with A Darker Shade of Magic. Even though it includes two of my least favorite words on the cover: "Book One".

Like every other fantasy novel it has a couple of magical dudes and a dark object of power that needs to be destroyed. It has the character required for the adventure that doesn't seem like an ideal candidate but is probably made of stronger stuff than it appears. There are warring kingdoms and the requisite intrigue and pawns. There is an extremely weak attempt to create some logically constructed fictional languages.

It has lines something like "she heard distant screaming and took several moments to discover it was coming from her own mouth."

It has multiple Londons in multiple worlds for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing about any of the Londons that seem like London. There's no placing this setting on a timeline or any attempt to do so.

This novel has two attributes to recommend it: it moves quickly and wraps itself up sufficiently enough that if you aren't inclined to continue the series you'll have no nagging questions if you ever remember these characters in the future.

I'm trying here, people.