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.