Review: Blaze of Glory

Blaze of Glory by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first four books in this series some years ago (more than 10), and now that the series is complete and I can get the ebooks from my library - more on that later - I'm doing a reread from the beginning. That was the right decision, since I don't remember them very well.

I enjoyed the book, but I am going to highlight some issues I had with it that reduced how much I enjoyed it.

The setting is basically early-20th-century Europe with all the names of places and historical figures changed; a few minor changes, like importing the mad king/crown prince in charge situation from the early 19th century; and magic as a reasonably well understood and widespread phenomenon. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of worldbuilding; I'd rather the author left the names the same and just did an alternate-history version. I don't think calling England "Albion" and Germany "Holmland" adds anything, or enables anything that the familiar names wouldn't, and so much else is the same (including a looming European war between the two) that it feels like the changed names are an attempt to distract from a lack of worldbuilding imagination.

The magic system is built on a number of "laws," but they're not explained in any depth, so the magic is not truly Sandersonian. This means that the protagonist, Aubrey, a privileged young man of 17 with all the wisdom that implies (not much), can essentially pull any magical effect the plot requires out of nowhere at the drop of a hat; he's a magical prodigy. His use of magic is in theory tempered, but in practice not really hindered much at all, by a foolish experiment with death magic at the beginning of the book that renders his soul in danger of detaching from his body if he exerts himself too much. Nevertheless, he runs around to a considerable extent foiling a series of interlinking plots. The journey is enjoyable, and even though he's sometimes a bit of an ass, he's generally well-intentioned and I was in his corner throughout. His sidekick George is essentially Sam Gamgee (he even carries Aubrey at one point in the second book), but with less angst and more self-respect; I like him, though he doesn't, in the two books I've re-read so far, get much of an arc of his own.

The editing is disappointing. There are a lot of excess commas between adjectives, including such egregious examples as "one, long sigh," "whole, marvellous construction" and "single, squat, stone building," none of which should have any commas in. "May" is used in narration in the past tense where it should be "might," there are a couple of missing quotation marks and a missing full stop, some replies don't match the sentence they're replying to (a sign of incomplete checking after a revision), and there's a dangling modifier. The second book is worse. It's a pity, because the storytelling and emotional arc are strong, and I feel an experienced author and one of the largest publishers in the world should do a better job than this. This is why I get trad-pub books from the library; the book costs twice as much as an indie work like Melissa McShane's The Smoke-Scented Girl , which I choose as a comparison because this one reminded me of it (a similar, though more imaginative, setting and a strong male friendship between broadly similar characters), but the McShane is much better edited.

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