Review: The Spell of the Black Dagger

The Spell of the Black Dagger by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The blurb, and the early part of the book, give the impression that Tabaea the Thief is the protagonist, and maybe that was the author's original plan - but she becomes the antagonist partway through, with the protagonist being the Minister of Investigation, who has to try to figure out (with the help and sometimes hindrance of a number of magicians) first who Tabaea is, and then how to stop her.

As the blurb conveys, Tabaea creates a magical black dagger. It enables her to steal life and inherent (non-knowledge-based) skills from people and animals (animal lovers may want to give this one a miss, though the descriptions don't get too explicit). (view spoiler)[For a long time, I thought it might itself be corrupting her; she went rapidly from "I've never killed anyone, but this stuck-up person I used to know maybe deserves it, though not really" to being a serial killer with no evidence of mercy, doubt, or regret. But it seems that was just her character arc, not the influence of the dagger - unless the other person who got hold of the dagger was just better at resisting it. (hide spoiler)] The way she degenerates from somewhat sympathetic protagonist (at least as sympathetic as several of the other protagonists in the series at the start of their books, anyway) to pitiful crazy person doesn't make this one of my favourites in the series, though it's well executed.

We get a return visit from the wizard of With a Single Spell, which is more linking together than this series usually provides. There's quite a lot of assorted magic, in fact, which is one of the strengths of the series, and the main thing I enjoyed.

View all my reviews

Review: Taking Flight

Taking Flight by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Departure from the (loose) series formula: this time it's not the protagonist who starts out selfish, unlikeable and unpromising. It's his love interest. She's immature, selfish and petulant. (view spoiler)[As we learn through the book, that isn't going to change; and so the story is not her changing but him realizing that she isn't going to change and being prepared to move on. (hide spoiler)]

Still a satisfactory story, and takes us to a part of the world that the earlier books hadn't explored, but not my favourite of the series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Blood of a Dragon

The Blood of a Dragon by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unlikable protag, who stays unlikeable much longer than the author's other protags, drags it down. Not up to the series' standard for that reason.

The protagonist is also younger than most, at 12 (the age of apprenticeship), and is remarkably, pig-headedly, disastrously and self-sabotagingly stubborn. He persists in an obviously wrong-headed course of action for far too long, and even when he (by coincidence) discovers a way that he can have what he wants, is determined to take petty revenge on someone who's done nothing but help him, because he wouldn't (because he couldn't) give the protag what he wanted. He's also, throughout the book, set on taking petty revenge on someone else who, likewise, couldn't have helped him any more than he did.

This makes him a very annoying character, but the journey has some points of interest.

View all my reviews

Review: The Unwilling Warlord

The Unwilling Warlord by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The protagonist this time is a gambler with probably-magical luck who discovers, to his surprise and dismay, that his grandmother was from a small kingdom where her family supplied the hereditary warlords, and now he's inherited that post. If he refuses, he'll be executed; if he fails, he'll be executed; and the king, who's an idiot, has managed to annoy both of his neighbours and all of his potential allies, and it looks like the kingdom is going to be conquered.

But the protag has grown up in a city which has its own ideas about war, and manages to recruit several magicians to help, which works... but complicates matters further.

In the course of the book, the protag undergoes the usual evolution from unpromising nobody to commendable somebody. It's believably done, and the journey is enjoyable.

View all my reviews

Review: With a Single Spell

With a Single Spell by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the things I like about this series is that a lot of the characters are magic-users of one kind or another, which is a type of character I enjoy. In this case, the protagonist is an apprentice wizard, but his master dies having only taught him one spell of seemingly limited utility (you can light fires with it, if you have some brimstone).

Obviously, the thing to do is to steal a boat, hitch a ride on a ship to a great city, and get recruited to help deal with a dragon problem in the Small Kingdoms. He then stumbles upon a highly useful place, but has to have the nous and moxie to do something useful with it.

I wasn't a huge fan of the final resolution in some ways, but he certainly worked for everything he got, and grew from a deceptive and unpromising boy into a man.

View all my reviews

Review: The Misenchanted Sword

The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I come to do this review I've already read several other books in the series (thanks, Covid), so I'll do a bit of a series intro as well as reviewing this specific book.

This is an early-Terry Pratchett-style series, in that characters and locations recur, but each book stands alone and is about a new protagonist. These protagonists are, to varying degrees, young (from early teens to early 20s, usually), and the books are basically coming-of-age stories. Typically, the protagonist starts out with an obvious fault such as a young person might credibly have: they're lazy, or selfish, or dishonest, for example. Over the course of the book, they grow and change from being an unpromising Everyperson to a solid character who we (generally) like and cheer for, and who achieves something remarkable.

The style is light and amusing, without ever becoming outright comedic.

The editing varies from not terrible to quite good; mostly the issues are simple typos, missing words (often "the"), and misplaced apostrophes where the noun is plural, and the latter is occasional rather than consistent.

In this case, the protagonist is a young soldier in a war that's been going on for centuries. (I found the multi-century war a bit hard to swallow, along with the idea that there were no prisoner exchanges. Also, (view spoiler)[when the war stops, it stops completely and there are no more wars to speak of (except petty ones in the Small Kingdoms) for the next several centuries; a bit more plausible, since after such a long war you'd want to be done with it, but still got some side-eye from me. (hide spoiler)])

He's a scout, and gets separated from his unit and stuck behind enemy lines, where he meets a wizard who, to get rid of him, enchants his sword. The enchantment... has its fishhooks, for sure, and while the biggest problem gets solved for him, he does protagonize trying to get out of his newly complicated situation.

One of the best features of the protagonist is that he doesn't actually want to kill people; he wants a quiet, peaceful life, and instead of this being a "reluctant protagonist" situation, it becomes a good motivator for him to overcome some obstacles. The resolution, despite the assist from a new character, is satisfying, and the character will have several cameos in future books in the series.

View all my reviews

Review: 813

813 by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lupin robs a man and ties him, and his associates in another room, up in order to make his escape. Next morning, the man is found murdered, with Lupin's card attached to his clothing.

Lupin takes a lot of pride in not killing (though he skates close to or even over this edge at times in his adventures), so he sets out to discover the actual murderer. Cue a roller-coaster of suspense with a dark, dangerous antagonist who stays ahead of Lupin almost the entire time. Lupin, while still highly competent, has a lot of setbacks and outright failures to contend with here. Also, like his British equivalent Raffles, he turns out to be highly patriotic when he has to deal with the German Kaiser.

View all my reviews