Monday, September 9, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Gossamer Mage by Julie E. Czerneda




The Gossamer Mage is a stand-alone fantasy novel from established SF/F author Julie E. Czerneda, featuring a fantasy world in which magic is non-existent except in a single country which serves as the story's setting.  More significantly, it's a world where magic, said to come from the Deathless Goddess, has a significant cost - the lives of those who wield it in various forms, and yet those with the "Gift" find themselves unable to reject it despite the consequences.  This setting forms the background for a fascinating story of a series of characters, whose reactions to the magic vary in significant ways.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
The world may have been magical once, but now, with one exception, it is a land where magic is non-existent.   That exception, Tananen, stands alone.  But any who might come to Tananen and survive its magical defenses may discover that the cost of such magic is high indeed.

For the magic comes from The Deathless Goddess, The Lady, whose magic inhabits the land.  For men who discover they have The Gift, they are taken to the Mage School to learn how to control it, for magic is shaped by intent and writing, and without clear intent, a mage will instead create gossamers, magical creations seemingly without purpose.  And with each act of magical creation, the Goddess takes a significant part of one's life, their health/age, their sanity, and then eventually their very existence.  And once a man discovers they have The Gift, they cannot help but feel a compulsion to use it...leading them to an early end.

For women who discover they have The Gift, they become Daughters of the Lady, her chosen to act on her will, which they alone can hear, and whose words they alone can speak.  It is the Daughters' mission to ensure the mages and lords of the land do not go against the Lady, and if so, to take action to stop it.  But if the Lady so needs to use her Daughters, a Daughter will become the Lady's Designate....and her life will so end.

Maleonarial, known as the Hermit Mage, seeks to use his final years left of power to find a way to kill the Goddess and free all others from the Gift.  But what he doesn't know, and may soon discover when he encounters a Daughter named Kait Alder, is that an outside threat to the Lady has returned, and threatens to consume everything in Tananen.  In the end, Maleonarial will be forced to take actions that will change this land of magic, the land of Tananen, forever.....
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It's weird to have a plot summary include 80% setup and only 20% of the actual plot, but the plot setup is so important for understanding how this book works that I felt it was the only way to write one.  This is not to say however, that the book is solely plot-mechanics based: it very much is a story with some strong characters through it all, in both the main characters and the lesser ones.  But it has to be said that this is a book that interrupts every segment of the plot with a quick artfully written explanation of the mechanics behind the world and the people within it, so yeah those setup mechanics are important.

But yeah, this book features some pretty strong lead characters.  Taking the lead from the start is Maleonarial, the powerful mage who went rogue and left the school years ago for ambiguous purposes, whose main goal is to find a way to end the Goddess and free the land from the "Gift" of magic, so that no other man or woman will find their lives cut short by such a gift that they cannot refuse.  While thought of as eccentric, his motives emerge from compassion and his intelligence is readily apparent, and he's really fascinating to read as he thinks through situations as they arise.  The secondary lead, Kait Adler (also known as the Daughter Kaiteaylon) is also excellent: beginning by fearing the disappearance of the Lady, only to find out instead of the threat to her by the mysterious foreign power....and to be conflicted by the fact that her son has manifested The Gift.  Together the two of them, as well as the unmagical Pylor (a local lord's cousin) make excellent viewpoints and characters to watch as they struggle to uncover the truth and figure out what to do about it.

More impressively though, the minor characters include a bunch who are also excellent to fill out this world, from the young mage who cannot stop his compulsion to create but despairs because he can only seem to create Gossamers, to Kait's naive son who goes from being excited about his Gift to seeing the horrible consequences, to a master mage scholar who is fascinating in how he's reacted to everything....it's a really creatively built cast that fills out the world and gives everything extra meaning.  I've been reading recently more than a few books whose secondary casts are archetypes and nothing more, but there's serious depth here.

Again, this book isn't perfect.  The prose is often seemingly poetic in style, and I'm not sure it always works, particularly in the setup explanations before each segment.  Moreover, a few characters talk in a pidgen tongue at times that I found hard to read (although this is something I struggle with even in books I like that feature such tongues, so this could be just a problem for me and not others) and doesn't seem to serve a purpose by existing in this world.  Still, the overall plot is extremely well done, with some very surprising twists and turns, and the book avoids a few tropes that I really really dislike - for example, at no point is the plot driven by characters making stupid actions uncharacteristically or as a result of ignorance caused by characters keeping unnecessary truths from the others.  And there are some moments of the plot where the characters and mechanics combine in really fascinating ways (the discussion between Maleonarial and his learned friend and scholar is fantastic) and the ending is definitely satisfying.

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