The Mortal Blade (The Magelands Eternal Siege, #1)

by Christopher Mitchell

[Berls]

I broke one of my rules and have read other book since finishing this... without writing the review. Partly because I've been really busy, but mostly because the other books were the next 2 books. I couldn't put them down! Each book was progressively better. The challenge now is to remember what happened in which book.

The Mortal Blade introduces us to the 4 main characters we follow through the series and, while I grew to love them all, at the start I was really only interested in a couple.

1. We first meet demi-god Aila. As demi-gods go, her ability to appear to mortals as anyone whom she chooses is pretty cool, but also pretty weak. She fought several hundred years ago on the wrong side and after a spending a good portion of those hundred years on "house arrest" she's now serving the winning side, while working as a rebel on the side. Even though I did Lik Alia at the start, I wasn't as invested in her story. Her life was very caught up with the god-queen and god-queen politics of the city and it got a bit confusing for me in this book. There's a lot of gods and demigods in this world and it took me a little bit to get used to and understand who they all were.

2. I think the next character we meet is Maddie Jackdaw. She was a character I loved from the get-go and was really invested in early on. She's mouthy and doesn't just automatically obey, she questions and thus, gets into a lot of trouble. She's been kicked out of just about every unit when we meet her and her mouth lands her into probably the greatest, but potentially scariest, assignment possible. This would be a spoiler, so I want say what she does, but it's cool and makes following her exciting.

3. Another character we meet is Corthie Holdfast - a Champion for the city who was kidnapped from his home world. He's a mortal but has super abilities, like the demigods/gods, like Battle Vision. I grew to like him, but at the start he was confusing to me in a similar way that Aila was confusing. He kept talking about how his sister was going to rescue him and I didn't fully understand the god/demigod/battle vision stuff at this point in the series.

4. Finally we met Daniel Aurelian and he pretty much immediately became my favorite character. He's Roser nobility and the only child with a lot of expectations weighing him down. His complaints and concerns showed him pretty quickly to be someone of good character, but flawed. So yeah, I liked him a lot.

The world - as I've already hinted it - is a bit complex. This has an epic fantasy feel and in some ways made me think of Game of Thrones. I'd very much like to see a map of this world as it feels like it could take place on a land mass about the size of Great Britain. And the city is under almost constant siege from these creature-people called greenhides that they're all fighting against in their own ways. There's a lot to grasp in this first book - but there's also plenty of magic, dragons, gods, and action to make up for it. And I was very compelled, thanks in part to a cliff hanger, to keep going through the next 2 books.

I listened to this, narrated by Shaun Grindell and his narration was really good. I was a little surprised at first that it was a male narrator, since our first main character to meet is Aila. But he did a really god job with both the male and female characters. Really glad I choose to try it and in audio!

Daniel Aurelian