Between the Covers: A Blight of Mages by Karen Miller
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
As I browse for something palatable to read, I notice in A Blight of Mages
by Karen Miller sitting in the suggestions window. As soon as I read the description I had to have it.
A Blight of Mages, is the prequel to the fantastic Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duo (The Innocent Mage
and The Awakened Mage (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker)
. The book takes place a few hundred years before the aforementioned books in the fictional country of Doranna, which is highly regarded by their for their mage work internally and by their magickless neighbors. The story centers around Barl Linden, an unranked yet powerful mage who yearns for opportunities denied by low her status, and Morgan Danfrey, a member of the council of mages the group controlling all of the magework in Doranna. Together, they can do once thought impossible magic. All of this success comes at a heavy cost, shown by the dramatic shift in the character of the book. Roughly the first half of A Blight of Mages is reasonably positive, but the final half takes a serious nose-dive to the dark side. Do not expect a happy book. You have been warned.
Karen Miller does many things well in A Blight of Mages. First and foremost, she is a master of character development. Barl Linden and Morgan Danfrey are extremely well developed, if deeply flawed characters. There is no character that I found lacking depth. There are plenty of strong female and male characters, as well as weak ones of both genders, which frankly doesn’t happen enough. The relationships she builds between them are rich and complex. She really takes great care to give them distinctive personalities, which is especially helpful for Kingmaker, Kingbreaker fanfiction.
Like George R. R. Martin, Miller can write a dark book with some really terrible events and still make you love the book. She is a master of this. The darkness of A Blight of Mages, while more subtle in this book than The Godspeaker Trilogy
(another excellent series by Karen Miller, the collected volume is due to hit shelves and e-readers in November 2012), is still just as compelling. She doesn’t make bad things happen “for the fun of it” either. She does a fantastic job showing why it had to happen the way it did, and I feel that in this book she has done a particularly good job of this.
While her concept of magic is not original by any stretch, she uses it deftly and creatively in her book. Magic in Doranna is performed by tapping into a fundamentally raw magical source that is a natural part of their world. This energy is harnessed through various symbols that focus the flow of energy and channel it to do specific actions, called incants. Incants are reminiscent of carefully constructed chemical reactions that use catalysts, symbols, and a mage as reactants. In this world, the strength of magic is limited only by a deficit in expensive catalysts, creativity of symbols, or the strength of the mage. Magic is also tightly controlled in Doranna, and its control functions much like a Department of Motor Vehicles joke: intensely political and bureaucratic to the extreme. Rampant discrimination against those not born to elite mage families and those who cannot perform magic defines the book. She takes her concept of magic and gives it serious, tangible issues. She refreshes what otherwise might have been a stale concept and makes it very real.
Finally, she ties A Blight of Mages into the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series perfectly. She leaves no plot holes. After concluding this novel, everything makes sense, but there is plenty still to wonder about. She provides explanation and depth for the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series well beyond my expectations. This exposition gives me a wonderful sense of completeness and really rounds out the plot of all three books. Sometimes prequels can be a mistake (can anyone say Star Wars?), but this novel is like an extra pinch salt. Without it, the food tastes fine, but it does wonders to brighten the whole thing up.
My only complaint with the novel is that I feel that the first half is too detailed and the second half is rushed. While written masterfully, I feel that slightly less time spent in the beginning would have allowed a bit more fleshing out of the end. The first half is also much slower than the second half, perhaps too slow in parts, which does not help the perception of rushing in the second half. That being said, I do not feel that she left anything out of her novel. Part of this sensation I know is due to the order in which I read the novels. A Blight of Mages was published after I had read the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker books and I was anxious to get to the juicy bits. The second half of A Blight of Mages primarily sets up the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker books, though I admit that the first half provides vital background that makes it all work. Be patient, as it is completely worth the wait.