Tavin is an exile from his community and his people – the
mages. Born with only a scrap of magic and barely considered adult, he is
content to remain in the human world, desperately seeking normality and to
forget that the Mageplane ever existed
Except soon it might not, which, with the return of his
brother, brings Mage politics to his doorstep and the sudden need to protect
his friends from the potential fall out of desperate mages seeking anyway to
preserve their home
Take an Olympic sized swimming pool
Fill it with thick, dark molasses.
Attach heavy weights to your wrists and ankles.
Now try to swim to the other side. This experience will
approach the pacing issues of this book. When I reached the half way point and
absolutely nothing of consequence had happened – indeed, most of the cast don’t
even leave one house – I was beyond tired of it and stopped reading. I normally
can read a 300 page book in less than two days – this is a bit longer than
that, but it was 4 days before I hit the half way mark because it was so slow
and I found myself finding excuses not to read.
It’s not that there are no redeeming features of this
book – far from it. The world setting is fascinating. The idea of a parallel mage
realm with its own culture that is so very archaic and formal and both alien
and impressive is really well built. The consequences of it collapsing and
dumping all of these magically powerful but culturally inept people into the
real world would be an epic thing to explore. The nature of magic is really
well described and built with lots of complexities and implications as to how
it works, why the Mageplain is dying and what that means for Mage politics and
conflicts and how the various powers manifest and interact and truly work.
There has been a lot of effort put into make a very comprehensive magic system
that is very real and fully fleshed out
But all of this is explained in a serious of truly
tedious info-dumps, many of them nothing more than convoluted internal
monologues with all this information just randomly splurged onto the page. Much
of the rest is explained in a series of painfully awkward lectures from
informed characters to the ignorant – without even the excitement of the
ignorant being shocked are surprised by the revelation. The fact that magic
exists and there are alternate universes out there is taken in stride with
about the same level of shaken surprise one would expect from discovering a new
and interesting condiment at the dinner table. The book is positively allergic
to any kind of drama – any kind of action – that doesn’t involve Tavin’s trainwreck
of a love life.
