The Geomagician by
Jennifer Mandula
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
I very nearly didn't pick this up, because practically all of the existing reviews were about how excited the reviewer felt, more than about the book itself, and that's usually a sign that it's not for me. But I took the risk, and I'm glad of it. It has sound emotional beats, and more thought has gone into it than is often the case with period fantasy, particularly about the social impact of technology - a huge factor in the real 19th century - and the role of religion, which also features in a way largely realistic for the period. (Taking into account that this isn't exactly our world, where nobody would have been under threat of execution for heresy in early 19th century Britain.) It isn't just set in a scenery-flats-and-costumes version of 19th-century Britain for the sake of the aesthetic; it uses real concerns of the period, and the speculative element, to drive the plot, which is what worldbuilding should do.
It's set in 1829, which in our world was after the former Prince Regent had succeeded his father as king, but before Victoria. The name of the monarch isn't mentioned, but it's a queen, not a king. I'm choosing to believe that this isn't the author starting the Victorian era eight years earlier by accident, but instead part of the difference from our version of history. This England does have a similar technology level and a similar society to the England of our 1829.
The fantasy element is that everyone has at least a small amount of magic, which can be concentrated into "reliqs" and then used by someone else to do useful things, like create light or heat, or clean things, or separate different substances, or heal. Fossils, for some reason, make particularly good reliqs, and the main character and narrator, Mary Anning, is a fossil hunter from Lyme Regis (based on an actual historical figure, I was surprised to discover in the afterword, as are several other characters). She has, through the support of a "geomagician" named Buckland - who studies fossils, and buys them from her - received some informal training in paleontology, taught herself a lot more, and become very knowledgeable, and she now wants to become the first female member of the Society of Geomagicians. To do this, though, will involve a lot of politics, complicated by the fact that her mentor and her ex-sweetheart are rivals for the presidency of the Society.
The ex-sweetheart, Henry, who gradually and quietly ghosted her while he was away being educated, is wealthy and initially comes off as arrogant and untrustworthy, seen through Mary's eyes at least. They were both friends as teenagers with a brother and sister, of whom the brother, Edgar, is now a viscount and in the House of Lords, while the sister, Lucy, is a witch (someone who can work magic without a reliq), also living in Lyme Regis; Mary's best friend; and heavily involved in the Prometheans, who oppose the whole system of people selling their magic for others' use as being contrary to human dignity. The four are still friends and allies to varying degrees, apart from the fact that Mary now can't stand Henry.
All of this supplies plenty of potential for conflict, and when Mary, on one of her fossil expeditions, brings a pterodactyl egg to life and it hatches, it precipitates a sequence of events starting with Mary's mentor and Henry coming on behalf of the Society to buy the creature. Mary demands nomination to the Society as part of the price, and they all head to London, where there are political, scientific, religious and social conflicts aplenty. Not to mention that Henry takes Mary on as his assistant, and they start secretly studying her ability to bring fossils to life - secretly, because it's theologically fraught, and she could, at least in theory, be executed if things turn the wrong way.
The book raises some important questions. If the system works in a way that disadvantages you and people like you, is it better to try to force your way into it - and end up beholden to people who benefit from it and who you had to ally with in order to get in, and benefiting from it yourself - or to work against it from outside, perhaps having to ally with people who want to tear it down, have nothing to put in its place, and are fully prepared to do harm, even to the people they supposedly support, in order to bring about change? What's more, should you sacrifice a place you've earned in order to open the way in the future for others like yourself? Is it right to suppress the truth or actively mislead others in the cause of self-preservation or a greater good? There are no easy answers given here; it's not setting out to resolve those questions, but to explore them, and show how struggling with them impacts people, especially people who respect or love each other but disagree on important points.
On the downside, it has the usual level of Americanisms (such as "fall" for "autumn" or "a few blocks away"), anachronisms ("boycott" - the term originated in 1880; "psychological break"; "workstation"), and malapropisms (most frequently "clamored" for "clambered," but also "toothsome" to mean "toothy" when it actually means "appetizing") that I generally see in books by 21st-century Americans set in 19th-century Britain. Also several of the other common mistakes that practically everyone makes, like frequently putting commas between adjectives that aren't coordinate, putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when referring to a family's home by the name of the family ("the Buckland's" where it should be "Bucklands'"), and sometimes (though not nearly as often as many writers) writing in the simple past tense when it should be past perfect. Also, practically every hyphen in the book is between an adjective and the noun it modifies, which is a place no hyphen should be.
There are a couple of outright cultural errors, too, like treating "pence" as if it was singular and referring to a member of the House of Lords as a "Member of Parliament," a term that only applies to the Commons. It needs another go-through by a really good copy editor, in other words, and perhaps, given that I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley and this is a major publisher (Penguin Random House), it will get one - though that's never guaranteed. Also, the author gives a long list of people who I take to be beta readers at the end, and thanks two editors (though they might not be copy editors), and it has got this far with these issues uncorrected.
While all of that annoyed me, it was still better edited than average (the average is quite low), and the story itself was a big step above that again. If you enjoy period fantasy set in Britain, and can set aside, or don't notice, the occasional anachronism or Americanism, and especially if you appreciate a narrative that takes actual concerns of the period and makes them central to the plot, this is probably for you. I hovered between assigning it to the Gold or Silver tier of my annual Best of the Year, because of the editing; in the end, I gave it the benefit of the doubt that the more significant errors would be fixed by publication, and, considering the depth and complexity of the story and its relationship to the premise and setting, put it in Gold.
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The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
