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A review by bibliophobe
The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso
5.0
A friend gave us a gift card for Barnes & Noble and so my wife and I decided to make an event of it. With Covid still raging, we planned a date night that involved some high-end take out fried chicken and followed that up with a trip to the book store. We ate our chicken in the great outdoors, and masked up to find some new bookly treasures.
We spent some time looking for a book that would interest us, and I kept finding book after book with great cover art, and sub par content. It took some time, but I finally decided I wanted something with fantasy magic and found this book. The back didn’t say much:
I actually only read the middle two paragraphs and decided it was interesting enough to give a go.
Right off the bat you’re introduced to a somewhat rebellious young woman sneaking about to get what she wants, and she encounters a dangerous situation, another young woman being attacked by a group of thugs.
These two women end up being the most prominent characters in the story and their lives become intertwined. They end up leaving their home town and traveling to another city in an effort to easy political tensions and find a horde of children that had been kidnapped. But neither of them is particularly skilled in diplomacy and they end up getting in a lot of trouble along the way.
The story gets a bit contentious with an underling plot of how mages are slaves in this society, their magic bound to serve the will of the government. This undercurrent was not only an undertone of the book, but expressly discussed and contrasted with the neighboring country that is ruled by mages. This topic was uncomfortable at times, but the author left the reader with the impression that our main character would be working toward the freedom of mages going forward and that result would likely be in a future book.
We spent some time looking for a book that would interest us, and I kept finding book after book with great cover art, and sub par content. It took some time, but I finally decided I wanted something with fantasy magic and found this book. The back didn’t say much:
In the Raverran Empire, magic is scarce and those born with power are strictly controlled-taken as children and conscripted into the Falcon army.
Zaira has grown up on the streets to avoid this fate, hiding her mage mark and thieving to survive. But hers is a rare and dangerous magic, one that threatens the entire Empire.
Lady Amalia Cornaro was never meant to be a Falconer. Heiress and scholar, she was born into a treacherous world of political machinations. But fate has bound the heir and the mage.
War looms on the horizon. A single spark could turn the city into a pyre.
I actually only read the middle two paragraphs and decided it was interesting enough to give a go.
Right off the bat you’re introduced to a somewhat rebellious young woman sneaking about to get what she wants, and she encounters a dangerous situation, another young woman being attacked by a group of thugs.
These two women end up being the most prominent characters in the story and their lives become intertwined. They end up leaving their home town and traveling to another city in an effort to easy political tensions and find a horde of children that had been kidnapped. But neither of them is particularly skilled in diplomacy and they end up getting in a lot of trouble along the way.
The story gets a bit contentious with an underling plot of how mages are slaves in this society, their magic bound to serve the will of the government. This undercurrent was not only an undertone of the book, but expressly discussed and contrasted with the neighboring country that is ruled by mages. This topic was uncomfortable at times, but the author left the reader with the impression that our main character would be working toward the freedom of mages going forward and that result would likely be in a future book.