by Sebastien de Castell
rating: ☆☆☆☆
published: 4th May 2017
spoilers? no
Goodreads
Galley provided by publisher
First thing you learn wandering the long roads, kid. Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story.
Sebastien de Castell's adult series, Greatcoats, is one of the best fantasy series I've read recently, and so I was intrigued to see what he'd come up with when instead writing for young adults. While I didn't enjoy it quite so much, it still had many of the characteristics that I love about Greatcoats.
The JanTep are a group of people living around an oasis that acts as the source of their magic powers. They are served by the ShaTep, who are JanTep who haven't succeeded in becoming mages. These ShaTep are often family members who, once revealed as having no powers, become a lesser class to the JanTep. Children gain their mage name at the age of sixteen, by passing four trials. So, naturally, there is a school for teaching magic. This was the major sticking point I had, especially to begin with, because "schools for magic" are done over and over, especially in YA fantasy, while they are used much less in adult fantasy. As a result, adult fantasy can feel more creative, so the start of this book at least felt a bit like it had already been done. Which meant I was thankful when the whole magic school thing turned out to not be even a major plot of the book.
What Sebastien de Castell does really well is keep the action going in a book. This is over 400 pages long, and I have a tendency to get bored around the 150-200 page mark of such long books, but that never happened with this book. There were never any lulls in the action, and it kept up right to the end.
If there is one thing I'd criticise about Sebastien de Castell's writing is that he's never quite able to write women of a certain age. Sure, he can write old women (very well in fact), and young girls aren't a problem, but it's ones that are in their teens to middle-age that always seem bland and are literally just there to serve the purpose of love interest. Yes, she did get some character development in this book, but that doesn't detract from the fact that she wasn't particularly interesting for the first 75% of the book or so. (I'm hoping the pattern whereby as we see more of her, she gets more interesting as in Greatcoats, continues.)
But overall, this book was very good. I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm eagerly waiting for the second book (even if there does seem some promise of a love triangle. I suppose I'll just have to suffer that).
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