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A review by rebeccacider
Shadow Magic by Danielle Bennett, Jaida Jones
3.0
Gets three stars because of the lovely writing, often elegantly handled themes, fun setting (fake Japan FTW!), and Kouje, who was just super compelling and deserves the Samwise Gamgee award for being a fantastic servant character in a fantasy novel.
An enjoyable read, but I think Jones and Bennett need to work on constructing and executing better plots. This one was made up of pretty good elements - and so was actually much better than the plot of Havemercy - but even still too often the characters were not doing very much or doing things that didn't 100% make sense in order to set up for future plot. Also, I am generally somewhat tolerant of overheard conversations, but please do not have your characters overhear vital information by running into just the right people *in the middle of a mountain range* and listening in for like ten minutes. Granted it was the part of the mountain range where they were most likely to overhear this information, but you should make your characters work for their overheard conversations - a few hours of espionage at least! :)
Iseul was also not that great of a villain - he was believable and creepy, yes, and the question of how the duty and order-obsessed Ke-Han should deal with having a crazy emperor was an interesting one, but I sort of was wondering why we were being told the story of this particular bad emperor. Emperors who try to assassinate their brothers and go back on peace treaties are probably a dime a dozen if you look at real world history.
Also, while they were well written and often very funny, Caius and Alcibiades were a bit two-dimensional; their thread was also suffering from the lack of plot, which exacerbated this. They sort of felt like anime/television characters and not book characters? If that makes sense.
An enjoyable read, but I think Jones and Bennett need to work on constructing and executing better plots. This one was made up of pretty good elements - and so was actually much better than the plot of Havemercy - but even still too often the characters were not doing very much or doing things that didn't 100% make sense in order to set up for future plot. Also, I am generally somewhat tolerant of overheard conversations, but please do not have your characters overhear vital information by running into just the right people *in the middle of a mountain range* and listening in for like ten minutes. Granted it was the part of the mountain range where they were most likely to overhear this information, but you should make your characters work for their overheard conversations - a few hours of espionage at least! :)
Iseul was also not that great of a villain - he was believable and creepy, yes, and the question of how the duty and order-obsessed Ke-Han should deal with having a crazy emperor was an interesting one, but I sort of was wondering why we were being told the story of this particular bad emperor. Emperors who try to assassinate their brothers and go back on peace treaties are probably a dime a dozen if you look at real world history.
Also, while they were well written and often very funny, Caius and Alcibiades were a bit two-dimensional; their thread was also suffering from the lack of plot, which exacerbated this. They sort of felt like anime/television characters and not book characters? If that makes sense.