Recent Readings

 Fireborne was... not good. I came across it in bouncing around looking for something to read and I initially thought it was written by an author I was familiar with, but after pausing to wonder why the style was so less appealing, I realized it was someone else entirely, go figure.

It's urban fantasy centered on a self-proclaimed sociopath main character. Her powers are sort of Rogue-like - being able to steal the magic of others to use herself, possibly to the point of killing them. It's not so unintentional, but the experience is empowering and reasonably addictive for her and she doesn't really value most people's lives, so there is struggle to avoid using it too much more to avoid trouble than to do the right thing.

Ultimately, though, I didn't find the story that engrossing and the focus on flirty "romance" encounters with guys that don't really pay off just put me off the book in general.

On the other hand, I picked up Child of a Hidden Sea afterward and got rather into that, along with the two sequels.

A marine videographer looking into her birth parents ends up getting pulled from modern San Francisco to "Stormwrack*," a world of much more ocean, genuine magic, and mysterious connection to Earth. I like Sophie as a main character - she may talk a bit much, but her curiosity is a good vehicle for exploring the setting. She (along with her brother later on) asks a lot of the questions that might come to the reader, deliberately trying to figure out if she's on an alternate world or if she's traveled through time or what.

Stormwrack society is rather tradition-based, with such curiosity widely frowned upon, especially among those who know about being back to travel back and forth - they actively make an effort to stifle the flow of information and discovery for a while, at least.

Magic on the world is one that requires special materials and the target's full name to inscribe a magical "intention," usually onto a scroll. A perhaps, at least, can only bear so much magical load before they start to suffer physical issues. Perhaps the most crucial detail is that destroying the scroll undoes the effect - to the point where a person can be inscribed to death and destroying the inscription will actually bring them back to life. It raises a lot of interesting ideas, some of which are explored and some are not.

I enjoyed the adventures of the characters. I enjoyed the quest of understanding while those adventures went on. I found that particularly refreshing. Though while some answers are discovered by the end, there are a lot of unanswered things that linger by the time the trilogy ends. That pulls things down ever so slightly in my mind after the dust settles (similar to, but less extreme than, how The Force Awakens' implicates to the Star Wars setting annoy me more than more I think about them).

* Curiously, Stormwrack also seems to be a name of an ocean-centric D&D expansion book that came out, I think, before these novels. I wonder if there was some inspiration there or if they came up with those names completely independently.