This fantasy novel was a recommendation that I saw on Broken Forum and is a very new release. It’s also the debut novel of its author Breanna Teintze. As usual it’s billed as the first book of a series but I happily found it to be very self-contained. The main plot is completely resolved in this book with no real loose ends so subsequent books will likely be about the further adventures of its main character. That’s a good thing as while this book is not bad, it’s nowhere good enough to interest me in reading any sequels.

Set in a world in which magic exists but casting spells causes toxic afflictions in the wizard, this novel features Corcoran Gray, a highly talented but unlicensed mage. His mentor and grandfather Acarius has been captured by the authorities and he is determined to free him. While on the run, he encounters Brix, an escaped slave from the Temple. He realizes that she can help him break past the wards of the temples to the god Jaern where he hopes to discover the whereabouts of his grandfather. She in turn wants to free her own sister. Acarius however contacts him via magic and instead orders him to recover an artefact that is used in necromantic rituals. To do this, they enlist the help of Lorican, a bartender who owes a great debt to Acarius and together they travel to an ancient underground temple. There they discover not just the artefact but a man who claims to be the god Jaern himself.

The novel opens in media res with an invisible Corcoran hiding in a barn where he encounters Brix so there’s no pause to give readers the lay of the land. The rules of magic and what it can do are similarly recounted mostly by Corcoran in between the action. This gets frustrating as we only ever see things from Corcoran’s perspective and he is mostly concerned only on moment to moment survival. We know that there’s a King, and there’s the Church and the Mages’ Guild and that there are multiple regions and cities but we never get a good sense of how big this kingdom or its geography or even I think what it’s called. In fact it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a world outside of what we see at all. Though the events in the novel are potentially worldshaking, what with an unstoppable horde of the undead and all, it never stops feeling like small beer. The book as a whole comes across as a light novel, yet given its grim tone and the pain and suffering experienced by the characters, this isn’t the writer’s intention at all.

The prose is fine, there is some effort to develop psychologically complex characters and the action is decently exciting. All the same, I have a hard time liking this book. Corcoran makes for a very unsympathetic main character due to his distrustful nature which leads him to conduct relationships on a transactional basis. Meanwhile the way the magic system works in this world means that passages sometimes read like a litany of pain and suffering for Corcoran as the toxic effects damage his body. This is compounded by the fact that he has a lame leg which causes him to experience terrible pain whenever he has to move fast and run away. He runs away a lot in this book and often gets the worst of encounters. It makes for rather depressing reading. He does get a win in now and again, mostly by employing his wits, but bits that I suspect the author meant to be very clever, I found merely very obvious. I also dislike how magic toxicity is a huge deal at the beginning of the book but later due to methods of routing the toxicity elsewhere becomes almost irrelevant.

Overall I found this to be a solid enough fantasy novel and I’m sure there is a market for it. But I don’t think there’s anything exceptional about it. It feels like amateur level material. Most damning of all is that I found myself much more interested in reading web fiction on places like Royal Road than this and so took my time finishing it. Not recommended at all.