Marah Bolender’s debut novel City of Broken Magic is built on an unusual magic system and world. The city Amicae is built to contain and ward off infestations of magic monsters that spontaneously form in broken amulets. The city designers did too good of a job and now the civic leaders and almost all citizens do not believe that monsters exist, and that’s a problem because amulets do wear out and break. Sweepers are responsible to remove any monsters that form, a terribly dangerous job.
Our heroine Laura is a Sweeper training under the only other surviving Sweeper, Clae. I kept expecting some romantic sparks between Laura and Clae, or between Laura and the new apprentice Okane but neither happened. Laura is determined to learn as much as possible and develop her skills just to survive, while she dissembles about her job to her aunt and cousin to avoid worrying them.
The plot felt contrived and had a few holes. Clae takes Laura to another city to present her to the sweepers from other cities, yet when they arrive they and their hosts are the only ones there, no one from the other cities, and many of their hosts are too busy insulting Clae to take more than a glance at Laura.
I’m not sure why City of Broken Magic feels flat, bland to me. The action felt 3rd hand, almost impersonal. The two main characters are decent, with Laura a strong-willed determined young lady who wasn’t going to die fighting monsters if she could help it. Somehow the book just doesn’t connect with me.
I think the biggest problem is the secondary characters seem taken right out of central casting: The greedy, foolish businessman, downtrodden almost-enslaved native, chauvinistic wanna-be boyfriend, matchmaking aunt. These characters never read like real people, they are 2-dimensional. There is also no true villain. A few characters get in Clae’s and Laura’s way, but they are minor problems, not over-the-top threats. Overall the poor secondary characters weaken the rest of the novel.
Several reviewers were not happy with how Bolender introduced terms that one had to infer from context, but I didn’t find this a problem. We learn about the world the say way a visitor would, in bits and pieces. I thought the author left several trails unexplored, ideas and situations that she could build upon in future novels, such as the intriguing city of tiers. The novel felt as though the author had a start and an end and took the shortest path from one to the other without looking at the scenery.
Overall City of Broken Magic was a decent read, not one I can rate as high as I would like to given the imaginative world building, but certainly worth reading if one enjoys fantasy.
3 Stars
My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance reader copy given in expectation of an honest review.
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