Blades of Magic by Terah Edun
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It is not a peaceful time in the Algardis Empire. War is raging between the mages and seventeen-year-old Sara Fairchild will be right in the middle of it.
She just doesn’t know it yet.
Sara is the daughter of a disgraced imperial commander, executed for desertion. Sara is also the best duelist and hand-to-hand combatant in Sandrin. She lives quietly with her family’s shame but when challenged about her family’s honor, her opponent inevitably loses.
On the night she finds out her father’s true last actions, she takes the Mercenary Guilds’ vows to serve in the emperor’s army. Using her quick wits and fierce fighting skills, she earns a spot in the first division.
There she discovers secrets the mages on both sides would prefer stay hidden. Dark enemies hunt her and soon it’s not just Sara questioning the motivation behind this war.
While fighting mages, blackmailing merchants and discovering new friends, Sara comes across something she’s never had before – passion. The question is – can she fight for her empress against a mage who might unwittingly claim her heart?
This is year one of the Initiate Wars. Sara is hoping it doesn’t become the year she dies.
Blades of Magic started off pretty well – with a warrior with a rare power skills in a kingdom that has mages (mostly elemental) and a drive to find out how her father had been executed. Sara has battle magic, which makes her a perfect warrior, if only she can rein in her power so that she doesn’t go berserk. She is, however, due to the dishonor of her family, forbidden from being one, despite a lot of training since childhood. That doesn’t stop her, however, from taking revenge and hoping to restore the family honor.
Sara’s path through the book is very convoluted and the plot feels like it is going in a thousand different directions. New things are brought up constantly, and though I would consider it usual for a first novel, there is no central arc to the book. It is like a hundred discrete plot threads that have started and not even one of them is resolved, not even a minor one. Things keep being introduced even towards the end, and it left me with a feeling that nothing of note happened during the book. The problem here wasn’t that the author was trying to write an epic fantasy with a single character POV, it is also that the plot was essentially not there. This format probably wouldn’t have suited it – the storytelling style would have preferable as a graphic novel – the serialization like style to the story and the open plot threads are more a characteristic of manga.
The narrator was decent and easy enough to follow, but cross-gender voices (as in, male voices from a female narrator) came out weird. There are also a lot of characters in here, and the voice range does accommodate to include various accents – although, I should mention, I don’t see why they were given different accents when they were from the same city. Nevertheless, it was easy enough to read this on audio and I consider the narration satisfactory.
Overall, I would say it has promising writing but the story needs focus and direction.
View all my reviews
Advertisements Share this:- More
