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A review by napkins
The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins
3.0
A really solid 3.5, but I'm rounding down for the clumsy exposition, of which there is a lot.
I'm kind of in love with the alternate history presented here: a world where magic and who holds it is tied just as heavily into medieval politics as religion and the various churches are. All the lines of magic tie back to the Nephilim and thus Judeo-Christian mythology, which I side-eye a little, but faiths are left to have evolved and adapted on their own - it never comes to a "you're all originally this, come back to the One Church" or anything similar, thankfully. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church is actively hunting and extinguishing magic. Ireland is a last holdout in a world where the faerie lines have been whittled down, protected by the Sidhe and the Morrigna. But unrest abounds from within, with some of the Sidhe unhappy with the influx of Celts and Vikings. And so begins a political dance of factions trying to control or save Ireland.
The setting is lush and the characters are well-developed and presented, but events and especially backstory fall prey to exposition dumps. Events jump forward, backward, and sideways in terms of characters, times, and settings, making it a little hard to keep all the threads straight or keep a story flow going. Some events are presented dramatically, but others are flashed by and it takes a few chapters to realize, "wait, no, that was really important!"
The modern storyline could've been handled a lot better, in my mind, by leaving it entirely until the end; I'd forgotten most of what had even happened by the time we jumped back to it. The two chapters bookend the story, but the main story is so involved that by the time we see 2008 again, the jump feels jarring.
The fight has so many sides and grey moralities abound, which I really appreciate.
I'm kind of in love with the alternate history presented here: a world where magic and who holds it is tied just as heavily into medieval politics as religion and the various churches are. All the lines of magic tie back to the Nephilim and thus Judeo-Christian mythology, which I side-eye a little, but faiths are left to have evolved and adapted on their own - it never comes to a "you're all originally this, come back to the One Church" or anything similar, thankfully. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church is actively hunting and extinguishing magic. Ireland is a last holdout in a world where the faerie lines have been whittled down, protected by the Sidhe and the Morrigna. But unrest abounds from within, with some of the Sidhe unhappy with the influx of Celts and Vikings. And so begins a political dance of factions trying to control or save Ireland.
The setting is lush and the characters are well-developed and presented, but events and especially backstory fall prey to exposition dumps. Events jump forward, backward, and sideways in terms of characters, times, and settings, making it a little hard to keep all the threads straight or keep a story flow going. Some events are presented dramatically, but others are flashed by and it takes a few chapters to realize, "wait, no, that was really important!"
The modern storyline could've been handled a lot better, in my mind, by leaving it entirely until the end; I'd forgotten most of what had even happened by the time we jumped back to it. The two chapters bookend the story, but the main story is so involved that by the time we see 2008 again, the jump feels jarring.
The fight has so many sides and grey moralities abound, which I really appreciate.