Synopsis:

Magic is a con game.

Kellen is moments away from facing his first mage’s duel and the start of four trials that will make him a spellcaster. There’s just one problem: his magic is gone. As his sixteenth birthday approaches, Kellen falls back on his cunning in a bid to avoid total disgrace. But when a daring stranger arrives in town, she challenges Kellen to take a different path. Ferius Parfax is one of the mysterious Argosi – a traveller who lives by her wits and the three decks of cards she carries. She’s difficult and unpredictable, but she may be Kellen’s only hope…

Review:

I am really confused with this book. Did I like it? Or didn’t I? I literally had to write down the positive and negative aspects of this book to determine if this truly a good book.

Let’s start with the magic. I liked it, it had a very cool Mortal Instruments feel to it or at least reminded me of the MI. Pretty much our characters are able to perform magic by creating patterns with their fingers and their tattoos controlled certain aspects of the magic as well which is somewhat an original idea and amazing! It truly was. Not to mention that at one point of the book they were throwing playing cards around and using them as weapons! I loved that fact that when magic is mentioned IRL you have two kinds of people, the book/movie buffs that this of witches and other magical creatures that can perform magic and then you have the rest of the world that aren’t fans of fantasy and think of a magician performing slide of hand tricks on the street as magic. I don’t even know if this was done on purpose but I loved this all the same!

I liked our main character, Kellen, who is the only person in his immediate family that cannot perform magic. Instead our main character has a fair amount of sass, wit and an odd gut feeling to survive. Though he was a bit of a dork compared to his prestige family, there is the chance for him to become a servant for the rest of his life if he doesn’t learn to produce magic. This I could understand but then all of a sudden, he is about to die and talks about the small things that his missed out on in life. Umm focus on not being killed! Time does not stop to give you time to reflect on your life. Why does this keep happening in books? Can you imagine how annoying it is if every time there was about to be a character killed in a movie time paused and the characters had a chance to reflect on their lives. The LOTR series would go for 60 hours! Please, there is no time to reflect, only time to live or die.

Also did I mention that they have talking cats (kinda… like a weird cat?) it was amazing and would have no problems insulting your life while calmly eating cake.

I think I’m done with the positives…

Let’s chat about the world building. Oh this will be nice and short. There wasn’t any. Literally none. I’m hoping that the sequel picks up on this flaw and elaborate a little more? I hope so!

And the characters ranking… was completely confusing until half way through the book… at least! Basically we get introduced to Jan’Tep and Sha’Tep. Jan’Tep have magic and Sha’Tep are unable to perform magic, and if you can’t do magic you become a slave for the rest of your life. Poor, repressed and treated like crap, whether you are family or not. Which seems simple when I explain it in like that but while reading the book there was no clear explanation between the two, it was almost like the topic was avoided completely until there was no point trying to hide it anymore. And to be honest I don’t get the hierarchy either, but I’m hoping that it will be explained more in the second book.

Besides Kellen, I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of the side characters names. After the first few chapters all descriptions of the characters were dropped so it was hard to relate to any of them, or even remember their names. Clearly they aren’t important enough and might not be featured in the next book? And let’s be honest most of them were arseholes. What his mother and father did was utterly disappointing but I won’t go into that because that is a little bit of a spoiler. Bit in the first few chapters of the book the children are carrying out testing to test their magic and ensure they can perform magic as well. Kellen’s younger sister called him out for cheating, casts a spell at him and kills him. Umm great bloody sister you are. Like come on at what point would forgive your sister and still complete love her when she literally killed you. DEAD. WTF? If my brother hit me with his car and then reversed back over me, we would have a serious problem on our hands. But nope, in this world killing your family is fine…? I don’t understand it and I was hoping that he would take his revenge on his sister at some point but sadly no…

Rounding this bad boy up. I kinda gave it a pitiful star. There were aspects that were beyond amazing and blew me away but then there was also parts that I sat there with a dumbfounded look on my face. Which isn’t a face I usually pull, you know wrinkles and all. The magic was phenomenal and I loved but the side characters were last week’s cheeseburger wrapper, oily, sad and you don’t want to touch it, cause you know. GROSS! So I am hoping that the next book brings it home, or at least tries? I’ll keep you posted.

Rating: 4/5

ISBN: 9781471406119

Publisher: Allen & Unwin