Small Magics for the Traveling Wizard by S.A. McKenzieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I did something unusual for me with this one: I bought a book that wasn't on sale.
I read far too much to pay full price for every book I read, especially since I seldom know going in whether it will be any good, but in this case, I wanted to support a fellow NZ author, and the preview had convinced me that I would be in good hands.
Having said that, it did have a couple of editing issues that didn't turn up until after the preview. One was dialog punctuation. The convention that isn't observed here is the one that says that if you start a new paragraph of dialog with the same speaker and no tag in between, you don't finish the first paragraph with a closing quotation mark. This tips the reader off that the speaker is still the same. This book several times includes the closing quotation mark, and in at least one case misses out both the closing and opening quotation marks when starting a new paragraph.
Also, if you put a dialog tag in the middle of a sentence of dialog, you don't treat the end of the tag as the end of a sentence, close it with a full stop and start the second part of the dialog with a capital; instead, you use a comma at the end of the tag and continue the dialog with the same capitalisation it would have if the tag had not been there.
There are some misplaced apostrophes as well, mostly to do with plural nouns and constructions like "a few days' journey," where, because we would say "a day's journey" and not "a day journey," the apostrophe is required, and comes after the s.
Otherwise, though, the copy editing was good, the prose smooth and capable. Most people wouldn't even notice the issues I've mentioned, apart from maybe being confused about who was speaking a couple of times without necessarily knowing why.
This is more epic fantasy than my preferred cozy fantasy, with a high body count among named characters who we've got to know and, in some cases, like. But what I liked about it was that it wasn't just made-from-box-mix standard epic fantasy. Yes, the protagonist (view spoiler), and there's a quest with a lot of walking. But there's a fresh twist on the tropes that are used, and the worldbuilding isn't just ordered by the yard from the generic fantasy world shop; some thought has gone into it. For example, there are three gods and three moons. Ninety-nine fantasy authors out of a hundred would then have a legend in which the three gods and the three moons were identified with each other in some way, but this one doesn't. And there were several other little touches that made me think, "Here's someone who understands something about how our actual world works, has taken note of the little oddities and asymmetries in real culture, and has built a world that feels authentic as a result."
Having said that, it had what is currently the norm for cozy fantasy, a culture in which gender is fluid and not binary, and also where plural marriage is common - though it was called out that the same was not true in other nearby cultures. This can easily feel like 2020s-progressive-orthodoxy box-ticking, and because neither of these cultural features was particularly important to the story, it did feel a bit that way to me, but it wasn't too obtrusive either. And it was well incorporated into the background culture, not just a difference that made no difference.
The characters had a good balance of capable-but-self-doubting, especially the protagonist, whose viewpoint we're in, and their backstories drove their current actions in ways that made sense. The bard worked a wonderful and completely bardlike trick at one point which resolved a dangerous situation solely through cleverly chosen words said confidently. The very elderly wizard was believably dangerous because he wasn't always completely in touch with reality. The fights were not overdescribed slogs, but quickly resolved and fairly deadly, which added a note of realism. I could mostly keep the minor characters straight and distinguish between them, and since there were about half a dozen, this is something not every author can achieve.
All told, it was an enjoyable adventure with appealing characters in a well-thought-out fantasy world, definitely at a higher level of ability than a lot of fantasy writing I've come across. The author has put in some thought and some work in places that often get neglected, and it shows.
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