Jules is a powerful
magician… but has spent much of his life avoiding the greater magical community
living as normal a life he can with his husband and child
His magical skills
are rare - and when a new supernatural threat those are in demand. The Circle
needs his magic and his help - the world needs it. But Jules’s grandmother
warned him about the Circle and how it was falling to selfish corruption… can
Jules work with them even for the sake of humanity?
This book had a
really excellent foundation, especially with some really good characters and
world. We have Jules, a Black gay man with a strong grounding in social justice
and considerable suspicion of authority. At this point it would be easy to
create a shell character who exists more as a PSA than a character - but he
isn’t; his opinions and vehement beliefs are worked well into the character and
his story. We also have some really neatly incorporated world building through
children’s stories which does an excellent job of introducing the world, his
family - both his son and his infamous grandmother - and giving us some insight
into magic. It was really neatly done and is an excellent example of how good the
writing is
The actions scenes
are fun and excellently written, well paced and nicely knife edged and in even
the brief time we have we do get surprisingly amounts of information about the
characters. Again with brief words we get a better shape of the world, the
circle and the how magic works.
Unfortunately in
addition to all that it was also… really short? And kind of undeveloped because
of it. Like I love that Jules is gay and has a relationship with Akif and a
son. But Akif is a name, I think he has three lines in the whole book. Yes
there wasn’t a lot of chance to showcase this relationship but that, again, is
part of how short this book was. The actual chance to develop Jules, Akif, his
relationship, his history, who he is, who they are are all somewhat missing. We
get Jules’s history with his grandmother and a brief reference as to why
they’re in London but then we kind of hit the ground running, Akif is forgotten
which is a shame because it clearly should be a major part of Jule’s life. It
would have been nice to build more of a base line for Jules and Akif et al
before the plot got moving, maybe introduced his powers, some concepts of magic
etc. Because the author already did a really good job with the stories he tells
his child (giving us some magical world building) which makes me think the that
more world building would be really well done
Albeit there’s just a
little side line of gross-out and obsession with orifices in the magic world we
could probably do without.
This
shortness/shallowness really shows when we come up against the Circle. After
having some pretty good lines about how power corrupts, we come to the Circle,
the powerful organisation of wizards that polices magic and various magical
monsters that have burrowed through orifices to Earth… and shock it’s corrupt.
And the boss man is kind of a caricature of awful... Again, I think it’s
because of the general fast feel of the book that developing a more nuanced
layered portrayal is sacrificed for just getting on with things. It doesn’t
help that Jules is, I think, supposed to be resistant to hierarchical authority
but instead comes off a bit… teenaged petulant? I mean the man’s a father, I’m
expecting a grown adult here, not someone who meets an authority figure and
team mates and starts snarking (amusing snarking, don’t get me wrong, but
still). Those team members (who are racially diverse and led by a Black man)
are also people who could use a little more development: Jules is working with
them on several missions
I say all this
because, just from this book, I can see the author can pull all this off with
more space which is what leaves me kind of frustrated. The elements we do have
of some of the character development, world building and little references like
how the collected circle members are unwilling to make a minor sacrifice to
help some injured members did a better a job of.
We have an excellent
world with an array of excellent diversity, some real characters and concepts,
some great political conflicts of power and self interest and actual motivation
and direction as well as some nicely horrifying (if somewhat disturbing)
supernatural threats to contend with all told with an excellent writing style -
but a style that could do to be a little longer and give us more space to
explore all of this.
