Monday, September 17, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Cold Magic by Kate Elliott




  Cold Magic is the first book in Kate Elliott's "Spiritwalker" trilogy.  As I've said before on this blog, Elliott is one of my favorite authors in SciFi/Fantasy today (though she's been around for a while at this point), with me having read 3/4 of her series in their entireties so far, each in some very different SF/F subgenres (Romance, Epic Fantasy, YA, etc).   The Spiritwalker trilogy, at least judging from this book, is a mix/muddle of a number of different subgenres - it's part steampunk, part fantasy with magic, arguably part YA (although it's not advertised as such), etc.

  More importantly, it's a decent start to a series, which left me looking forward to where the series is going.  The story takes place in an alternate version of industrial-era Europe, where magic - particularly cold magic (but not exclusively) and supernatural creatures are real - and where history played out very differently - our main characters for example are Phoenician in origin because Carthage didn't lose the Punic Wars.  The result of this very different world is a story that, despite some familiar touches, is very unpredictable in where its going at any given point in time, to a very effective end.

More after the jump:

----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Catherine "Cat" Hassi Barahal is an orphan of Kena'ani (Phoenician) descent, with her father and mother having passed away in an accident when she was barely young enough to remember.  Raised by her uncle and aunt along with her cousin Bee, Cat hides a secret from all but Bee: that she possesses a small magical ability to hide herself from those looking, and wishes to find out more about her explorer father - something that will show proof of her being special.  And this wish causes her to get in trouble in a Europe ruled by the Cold Mage Houses and the remains of Roman and other societies, since Cat is not one to keep her mouth shut.

But when a Cold Mage comes to her family's house and demands the "eldest" Barahal, Cat finds herself married to him and forced to accompany him to protect Bee.  The Cold Mages are powerful and the real power in Europa, and wish to impede the technological progress of the world to prevent some greater doom, and what one wants with Cat she has no idea.  But as she journeys with him, various creatures and beings from the Spirit World make themselves known to Cat, calling her their kin.

And then Cat finds herself on the run in both the physical and spirit worlds, with foes and potential foes seeking her desperately.....for while Cat's dreams of being special may have just been teenage dreams, others seem to think her very important for the fate of Europa itself.
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Cold Magic is the story of Cat, who narrates the story entirely in first person.  And Cat's a pretty fun protagonist - witty and sarcastic, impulsive but incredibly self-confident.  Other heroes, when randomly given a magical sword by a supernatural creature, would look confused - not Cat, who takes it entirely in stride.  And that's about the least of the crazy things that happens to Cat throughout this book - and despite that it rarely takes her more than a few minutes to adjust.  That's not to say Cat always makes the smart decisions regarding these happenings - her impulsiveness gets her into trouble more than once - but it makes her a very fun protagonist to read and she carries this book.

That's good because this book doesn't spend much time with any of the other characters except for a few, two of which are kind of spoilers so I'm not going to mention them here.  The other main character who gets a lot of development is Andevai, the cold mage who Cat gets married to and starts off the adventure.  Readers will see sort of where the marriage between him and Cat is going from the start (this is hardly a unique form of romance in literature) but outside of his angle as a romantic interest for Cat, he gets a lot of interesting development in his own right in his background and motivations, which makes me look forward to seeing what actions he will take in future books.

While this book doesn't develop a large number of characters - although there certainly are quite a lot of them - what it does develop is a VERY different world.  The presence of magic and supernatural creatures and the spirit world has resulted in a very different Europe, where the Roman Empire was beaten back by foes it defeated in our world (Carthage, the Celts) yet still has a heavy influence on modern Europe - the existence of a charismatic leader who tried to reunite the Empire is a major plot point for instance.  And then there are the mage houses, which rule Europe to some extent, and then there's the supernatural creatures, like trolls and djeli....and that's just in the material world, there's a whole other world in the Spirit Realm.  It's a tremendous bit of worldbuilding from start to finish, and I've definitely left out many many elements - and some elements are teased but not explored in this start to the trilogy - which keeps you always on your toes as to where the plot is going, but is done well enough that it never feels like Elliott is just pulling things out of thin air and is over-complicating it.  I really want to see more in this world.

If this book has a problem, it's that the beginning is rather slow.  It takes about 20% of the book for Andevai to arrive to marry and take away Cat, (as advertised in the book's plot summary on Amazon) and before then the plot sort of meanders for a bit and doesn't grab one's attention.  After that point, the plot rarely takes a second to stop and works on a breakneck pace, but the beginning is a bit off.  Other than that, well, the only other flaw is that the book ends on a pretty major cliffhanger, even if the general plot conflict of this volume is resolved.  So don't expect this to be satisfying as a stand-alone volume.

I've already taken the book's sequel, Cold Fire, out from the library, and I look forward to reading it, as Cold Magic is definitely yet another excellent start to a series from Elliott.


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