fantasy
What a fun first installment of the spinoff series from V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series! My favorite characters are back along with a
cast of new characters seven years after the last novel left off. In this fantasy world, there are four
Londons—black London which is a burnt out shell of the magical source city it
once was, white London which has had a string of imperfect, chaotic leadership
causing the magic to disappear, red London where magic still thrives although
it seems to be slowly disappearing and there are those who blame the unmagical
new king, and gray London which is without magic. A new magical queen, Kosika, has
emerged in white London and a talented girl named Tes seems to have fallen into
the middle of trouble in red London. Gears begin to turn in their worlds which
could mean significant changes are coming and these two young women are going to be involved.
The Fragile Threads of Power gave the readers all the
updates we hadn’t realized we’d needed about our beloved characters since we
last left them. Meanwhile, it introduced a bunch of new characters who fit into
Kell and Lila’s worlds perfectly. I thought Schwab’s writing was brilliant
on this one. I had to know what would happen and truly enjoyed every minute. This
was better than the Shades of Magic books! This is the only other book of
Schwab’s that has filled me with as much enjoyment as The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. While I’ve enjoyed the other novels of hers that I’ve read, they
definitely weren’t as good as Addie. But this one was magnificent! While I knew
where some of the storylines would go, it was still full of surprises and
adventures and discoveries and very fun magic! However, I do think readers would
benefit from reading the Shades of Magic series first. Schwab does include
background information but the reader will miss understanding the personalities
of Kell, Lila, Rhy, and Alucard.
The worst thing I can say about this book is that the cover
art is awful. It looks like something designed on one of the original graphics
programs from the 1980s. There are so few covers I dislike on books—frankly, I
don’t normally pay much attention to the covers unless they are spectacular.
But every time I saw the cover of this book it annoyed me and made me feel
badly for Schwab. As an author, she is certainly worthy of higher quality cover
art. This just has a ridiculously simple
gradient background and an overly shadowed purple image of a girl pasted onto
that background. And the colors clash. I truly can’t say a nice thing about it.
However, I won’t let this impact my rating of the book itself. I just had to
mention how terrible it is. That’s probably a first for me.
The audiobook was a bit of a letdown. I had forgotten that
Kate Reading and Michael Kramer had read the audiobooks for Books 2 and 3 of
the Shades of Magic series. In fact, I specifically avoided those audiobooks because these two were narrating them. I’ve enjoyed them in several
Brandon Sanderson audiobooks (well, Reading always bugged me but I got used to
her eventually) and their voices are so type-cast in my mind as belonging with
those worlds and characters that I couldn’t get past that fact while listening
to them read this different author’s series. But I decided to forge ahead
because the audiobook came available at the library and I didn’t want to wait.
Sadly, it was so distracting listening to these two narrators. Also, I don’t
feel they were the right talent for this novel’s protagonists who are all young.
Kramer and Reading are not young and they definitely don’t sound young. Plus, they
often didn’t speak with British accents when voicing these British characters! They
both have great vocal repertoires, especially Kramer, so I'm not sure why they didn't use the accents more. Thankfully, however, this novel had a third
narrator, Marisa Calin. She voiced Tes’ sections and she was marvelous. I loved
her voice acting and vocal repertoire. However, she did tend to speak too
quickly at times when Tes was frantic (which was actually fairly often). I’ll
give Calin an A- but I have to give Kramer and Reading Cs for this one. Mind
you, I’ve given them As for the other author’s novels. They just weren’t right for this one. And
this is now the third book of Schwab’s they’ve narrated of which I'm aware. Sigh. If they are
involved in future audiobooks for this series, I’ll likely select the Kindle
version instead.
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