Rating: WARTY!
This was an advance review copy, and we reviewers are always warned to keep that in mind, but what I keep in mind is that in this day and age of electronic publishing, publishers and authors have little excuse to put out a review copy that hasn't been properly vetted for errors. In this novel, some of the phrasing, granted not much, but still some sounds like it was run through Google translate, such as "Yet it sat with Zacharias ill to overturn..."
Additionally, there were also some odd words mixed in, some of which were evidently made up yet nowhere where they defined or set in a context so it was obvious what these words meant. Some parts of the novel were run together, and I suspect that this was caused by the transcription process into Kindle app format rather than anything that the author did. The following is a copy of how an example of this appeared in my smart phone Kindle app:
Damerell waved him away. “Have some sense, man!” he gasped. “Don’t interrupt!”“What can you mean?” said Rollo.I seriously doubt that the author made the absurd line breaks, the oddball line spacing, and the random font changes that I saw in my Kindle Android app copy, but this is an issue which needs to be taken care of!
Those things aside, the story got off to a great start. It was, once again a story where magic is in decline, and once again a story where women are all but forbidden to use magic. How that works is a mystery to me. Yes, women have long been forced into second place (assuming they were granted any place at all in society), but this was in regular everyday life not in a magical world where things are very different. What we have here is such a world, yet we're expected to believe that this made no difference to how society developed. I didn't buy that, but it's that shaky premise that we have to deal with here. Other than that, it began as an engrossing story.
Set in England, during Napoleonic times, we enter a world where the new Sorcerer to the crown is a black man - a protégé of the previous magician, who was highly regarded. Popular sentiment is turning against Zacharias because he is resented for being black, but "worse" than this, he's seen as an ideal person to blame for the decline in magic in England.
In order to escape the calumny, Zach takes up an offer from an acquaintance to speak in his stead at a girls school. This will get him out of town for a few days at least. He doesn't know that there is a girl, Prunella, at the school, who is oozing with magic and who is, like Zach, not white. She has also lost her father as Zach has lost his father figure. You would think they would have a lot in common, and I was sure the author's intention as to bring these two together, but as it happened, they were as different as chalk and cheese, which would have been fine if they'd had some chemistry and had no chemistry, but they did not. None at all.
Prunella was quite impressive as a character to begin with, but then she discovered something during the visit of the Royal Sorcerer, and promptly turned profoundly stupid. She discovered something in an old bag her father left for her - something which would be of huge benefit, and she knew that she needed professional advice on how best to employ this material, but never once does she think of approaching the Royal Sorcerer!
He was right there at the school. She was in his company at the same time as she had this knowledge, yet never once did it cross her mind to approach him, and neither were we given any reason - let alone a good reason - why she failed to do so. This made no sense and for me was the first false step in this story because it made Prunella look like a moron.
Let me side-track for a minute to say that I don't get how these two characters are named, and no explanation is forthcoming from the author, not even a poor one. Prunella hails from India, where Prunella, believe it or not, is not a common name. Prunella is, in fact, Latin in derivation. Zacharias is supposedly African, where again, Zacharius was nowhere near the first name of choice. It is in fact the Greek form of the Hebrew Zechariah. Neither name was applicable. Character names are important and for me, these were failures.
Back to our regular programming. I can see how an author might want to keep their main characters apart for as long as possible, especially if there's a romance in the offing, just to increase dramatic tension, but if you're going to do this you need to offer valid reasons, not poor ones, and especially not ones which make your main female character look like an idiot. You certainly don't want to bypass that altogether in the evident hope that the reader won't see the plot hole. Trust me, there aren't many readers who are as dumb as Prunella appears to be, and it's insulting to your readers to suggest otherwise!
I don't get why Prunella was so appallingly slow to share with Zacharias her discoveries in the attic. In the end she didn't share them so much as he blundered in on them. I like that she bonded with Mak Genggang (which is an awesome name), but that relationship was short lived and never really went anywhere. It was like Mak was nothing more than a key to open a door for Prunella, and was then discarded.
I kept bouncing back and forth between delight with the obvious Asian influences the author brings to her story-telling, and being frustrated at how slowly the story progressed. Some people are never happy, huh?! LOL! A little tighter, with some more momentum would have been appreciated, but I did maintain my interest even through the frustration.
This story was different and had a freshness to it despite using a lot of tropes, and I enjoyed how fresh it was. I liked Prunella initially, even as she irritated me at times, but my appreciation of her deteriorated as the story progressed until I had no time for her. Zacharias I never did warm to. He seemed to be such a Mary Sue in that he was more like wallpaper than an app. He really wasn't a protagonist in that he was not proactive at all. Everything happened to him. He did nothing himself which made him totally boring. He seemed far too content to float down the river in a tube rather than fire up a speedboat and get where he needed to be. Given the derision in which too many people held him, and the repeated attempts on his life, his lackadaisical attitude was simply incomprehensible when it wasn't laughable.
Prunella had a lot more oomph to her, but she seemed to be marching to her own obscure drumbeat. For two characters who were supposed to be thrown together and develop a relationship (however it was intended to turn out), they were completely at odds, and not in a good way. They were not a team nor did they look like they were on their way to becoming one.
For a novel which is supposed to be about, inter alia inequality (of race, of gender, and of wealth), this novel seems still to go out of its way to segregate women in some regards, such as in how they are titled. Zacharias is a thaumaturge, yet he insists that Prunella is a thaumaturgess, and later a Magicienne. Why? Why can she not be a thaumaturge as he is or a magician? For that matter, why not a sorcerer since she has a familiar? That's sorcerer, please note, not sorceress.
I didn't get why the author went out of her way repeatedly to segregate her as a woman when the whole book was supposed to be about integration. People are welcome to disagree, but for me, it’s time we shed these gender-confining distinctions. We got rid of "miss", so why retain the idea of mistress - that is to say, why retain the -ess suffix for women? Someone who acts, for example, is an actor, not an actress. We don’t call female doctors doctresses! (and let's have no more of 'dress'! From now on it must be dror! LOL!).
Here's one reason why I ended up not liking her: "Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield." There were other times I did like her, but in the end, she was all over the place in my estimation and my liking dwindled to nothing. There were examples of her doing good and supportive and grateful things for the opportunity she'd been given, then there were other times when she would turn immediately around and act like the most stupid person in the entire Kingdom. I don't expect a character to be perfect. That would be as absurd as it would be boring. I don't mind a main character starting weak, or stupid, or clumsy if they improve, but when a protagonist like Prunella starts out likable, and then turns a reader off them, they're written poorly, period.
One classic example of her stupidity was when she attended a party and observed a magical orb sitting on a table. Later she encounters that same orb at Zach's house causing mischief and mayhem, yet never once did she share her inside knowledge with Zach. Instead she secretly snuck out, leaving an obscure and ambiguous note for Zach, to break into the house of her friend's greatest enemy for no better reason than to see if the orb she had seen earlier was still on the table in that house!
If it had not been there (no matter what other reason there might have been for its absence) she would then "know" that this orb that had delivered chaos to Zach's home was one and the same. Instead of leaving the orb behind her, she took it with her and thereby delivered it straight into the hands of her enemy, losing her evidence! Classic stupidity. I can’t go to bat for a character who is so relentlessly clueless, nor can I harbor any great wish to read more about her.
Inertia was one of the worst traits of this novel - no one did anything. Even Prunella, the most active of the protagonists, barely moved except to go to parties to try and pick up a husband, and nowhere did she count love or companionship as one of her expectations from this hoped-for betrothal. She worked for nothing yet gained everything. In another inexplicable example of inertia, I have to ask why was it, exactly, that despite the bountiful threats against his protégé from every quarter, did Sir Stephen's ghost wait to act until we were three-quarters the way through the book? And then failed to deliver anything? What was the point of this ghost? I saw none.
Deus ex machina was another issue. Prunella's stupendously growing powers were coming out of nowhere. We were offered no reason whatsoever to explain why she started out doing small but impressive low-level magic and then in a matter of a few days or weeks at best, she had grown to be the most powerful magician in England if not the world. Yes she had some training and read a couple of books, but this was, judged from the way the story has it, a limited and cursory amount of both training and reading.
Yes, she had three familiars, but nowhere are we given any indication that these three are contributing to, much less actually enhancing, her powers that she should become so strong so fast. Indeed, nowhere is it explained exactly what familiars these represent, what they are supposed to contribute, or why they are so important.
Other have reviewers, I've noted, have complained of lack of character development and world-building. I don’t worry over much about those kinds of things if the story itself is good, but what I do care about is huge gaps in the story-telling - where things happen out of the blue, with no presaging at all, or where huge changes take place with little or nothing to account for them. Too many things are completely glossed over in this story.
The sad corollary to all of that is that When we finally reach the point at which Prunella is unleashed and enters her first magical battle, it’s skipped completely - we only learn of it after the fact, and then get no details, only the result. It’s like the author was too timid or lacking confidence to write the thing, and we had all of this build-up with nothing to show for it. The ending rather fell apart. It dragged out far too long and a major character was callously killed off by Prunella which made me really actively dislike her at that point. I was very disappointed in how all this played out.
I know this was a début novel, and both the premise and the promise are great, but this was simply not ready for prime-time. The sad thing is that the novel deserved some real pre-publishing support from the publisher and it evidently got none, or at best, insufficient, which forces me to ask once again in this age of self-publishing, what exactly is the benefit and point of going the Big Publishing™ route if what could have been a masterpiece is so badly let down? I cannot recommend this novel as a worthy read, but I confess that having read this effort, I am interested in following this author's career. She has an awesome name, and I think she has places to go. I'm curious as to where she goes next!
