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A review by winterscape
The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
5.0
4.5 stars
I don't know if this was a case of the "right book at the right time," but I thought The Innocent Mage was fantastic. It's full of tropes, but they work. I've been so dead tired with fantasy novels that contain two hundred action/battle/fight scenes and a body count of over ten thousand. The Innocent Mage is about how two people become unlikely friends. It's about Andy Bernard's joke from The Office ("His birth name was Walter Bernard Jr., but after his younger brother was born, his parents decided that the new baby better embodied that name."), but not played for laughs. It's about family, and dealing with the mortality of your parents, and sibling relationships, and how being an outcast can manifest differently in different people. But, it's also rife with magic (soft, not overly explained, easy to digest old-school magic) and political machinations against the backdrop of a pseudo-medieval Western Europe-esque countryside, which to be honest, I was missing and was nice to revisit. One of my favourite little touches was the written accents and how it's shown through dialogue over time as a character begins to lose it.
It would have been a 5 stars from me, but the ending gets a little bit away from itself and starts to focus on the ramp up to world destruction, which is fine, just not what I'd been savouring.
All in all, love it, will definitely be buying Karen Miller's other books.
I don't know if this was a case of the "right book at the right time," but I thought The Innocent Mage was fantastic. It's full of tropes, but they work. I've been so dead tired with fantasy novels that contain two hundred action/battle/fight scenes and a body count of over ten thousand. The Innocent Mage is about how two people become unlikely friends. It's about Andy Bernard's joke from The Office ("His birth name was Walter Bernard Jr., but after his younger brother was born, his parents decided that the new baby better embodied that name."), but not played for laughs. It's about family, and dealing with the mortality of your parents, and sibling relationships, and how being an outcast can manifest differently in different people. But, it's also rife with magic (soft, not overly explained, easy to digest old-school magic) and political machinations against the backdrop of a pseudo-medieval Western Europe-esque countryside, which to be honest, I was missing and was nice to revisit. One of my favourite little touches was the written accents and how it's shown through dialogue over time as a character begins to lose it.
It would have been a 5 stars from me, but the ending gets a little bit away from itself and starts to focus on the ramp up to world destruction, which is fine, just not what I'd been savouring.
All in all, love it, will definitely be buying Karen Miller's other books.