Review: Magic Dark, Magic Divine

Magic Dark, Magic Divine by A.J. Locke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read a few books this year that are sound in terms of their emotional beats - so they make it to my Best of the Year list - but have significant flaws that drag them down to the Bronze tier, and this is one.

Let's get the copy editing out of the way first. A collection of the usual mistakes (excess coordinate commas, occasional missing past perfect tense, the odd dangling modifier, vocabulary errors, a hyphen consistently where it doesn't belong - in "magic-era" when it's an adjective and a noun rather than a compound adjective - and the odd missing or incorrectly placed apostrophe), plus one I haven't seen before: overcorrection of "laid" to "lay" when "laid" is in fact the correct verb. It isn't great; it isn't terrible; I've seen a lot worse.

The real issue I had was the worldbuilding. The main character (we quickly learn, so this isn't a spoiler) is from the should-not-be-hyphenated magic era, a period 300 years before when magical practitioners and magical creatures existed, thanks to a set of portals that periodically opened to let particular kinds of magic into the world. Those portals had to be closed to contain a dangerous, destructive monster during a kind of magical peak that happens every 300 years, and that peak is about to happen again. The protagonist, Pennrae, spent all but the last eight of those 300 years in magical stasis as a result of disobeying guidance from a Diviner, one of the types of magic user, for reasons that seemed good to her at the time (and are, like the whole story, emotionally realistic).

In some unexplained fashion, she has, in those eight years, completely mastered modern life, got hold of whatever identification documents are required for her to live and work in a modern city, and learned karate well enough to be an instructor. She comes off as a completely modern woman in every discernable way, apart from having a history in which she was a magical bounty hunter 300 years ago in a very different world, making her what I call a "decal character": her origin is stuck on her superficially, but everything else about her makes her feel like she's grown up in the modern world.

She lives, in fact, in New York, so called and completely recognizable as closely resembling the modern city of our world, except for an additional park, a few monuments, and some other remnants of the magic era. Instagram exists, there are cellphones, and in general this is almost entirely the New York that you and I could go and visit, with a couple of mostly cosmetic differences. The magic era, on the other hand, does not feel like our world's eighteenth century in any way whatsoever, and the placenames and even the geography don't seem to correspond to our world either. The geography, in fact, is very unclear. The portals (it turns out) were in New York, a fact which has somehow been forgotten, unlikely as this may seem. Pennrae's mother and sister, murdered by a warlord in the magic era, are buried in an old cemetery in New York for plot-relevant reasons, so was the warlord's territory part of the modern US (or whatever the country is called - we never see any more of it than New York City)? Or were they, for reasons never gone into, taken to NY for burial despite dying elsewhere? Pennrae's hibernation took place in Namibia, suggesting they were in Africa, and they are of African descent, but if so, why are they now buried in NY? I couldn't make any sense of that side of things at all.

Also, everyone appears to speak modern English in all places and times we visit, but all of the terminology of magical creatures and magic use feels vaguely a bit Latinate-ish, kind of like in a certain boy wizard book, but not actually derived from any language I'm familiar with. It doesn't strike me as African in origin, either. It feels just made up, with some influence from real European languages, but by someone who isn't a linguist.

What the whole thing feels more like, in fact, is a portal fantasy, in which the "magic era" is actually a different world, and the New York that so closely resembles our own is our own; but we're told it's a part of the same world's history.

So, on the one hand, we have a modern-seeming woman in a modern-seeming setting doing modern things. On the other, what feels like a completely invented secondary fantasy world. And between them, a bridging explanation that for me completely failed to match up or make sense.

Still, as I say, the emotional beats worked well enough that I do recommend it. I don't think I will be looking for future books in the series, though.

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