Review: Minor Mage

Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A classic underdog kid story; the publisher's editors insisted it wasn't for kids, just about them, but there's a lot more darkness in a lot of kids' stories than in this one, often without a happy ending, and if I had kids aged between, say, nine and about 14, I'd certainly encourage them to read it. It's enjoyable for adults, too.

It's also a classic "incompetent mage" (or rather "barely-competent mage") story; the 12-year-old protagonist, Oliver, only knows three spells (though he does, it turns out, know quite a few charms that don't count as spells within the meaning of the Act, so this is a slight cheat to make him sound less competent than he is). He uses two of them to excellent effect in some tense moments; the other one deals with his allergies, so it doesn't really count.

It's a classic trope of YA that the kid is sent off to do something dangerous because the adults are incompetent or incapable or uncaring, and in this case it's the incapable one. Oliver is the only mage the village has, his very elderly and not particularly compos-mentis mentor having died, so (while his mother is helping her daughter with a new baby in another village), he gets sent off by a slightly apologetic mob to do something about the drought that is threatening everyone. It's vaguely known that there are Cloud Shepherds off in the mountains, and that a mage can go there and bring back rain, so that's his mission.

It's a dangerous road, so it's just as well that he's inventive and courageous, though he does have a realistic reaction to the various trials he encounters; he's not one of those stoic heroes of Very Serious Fantasy. This isn't Very Serious Fantasy, by the way; it has more than a hint of Terry Pratchett, not least in the apt observations about life that are dropped in occasionally ("If humans don't let things out, they get weird," says Oliver's armadillo familiar, for example).

The snide familiar is great, Oliver is appealing and feels real, and all in all it's a fun ride. There are certainly dark moments, but there are some hilarious moments and touching moments and moments of great kindness and humanity generously sprinkled in as well, and ultimately it's that side that wins out.

The editing is decent, but not perfect; the three copy editors have missed the author's persistent bad habit of putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, and three or four places where she's missed a word out of a sentence, and a couple of places where there's a comma after "Sure" or "Of course" in a context where it shouldn't have a comma, because it's just agreeing with an earlier statement. Generally, though, it's clean.

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