August Book Reviews: Servant Mage by Kate Elliott
Another book from my long-term Libby tbr, which I added because I greatly enjoyed Elliott's latest. In Servant Mage, young Fellian has been an enslaved mage ever since her parents were executed for treason. When a strange group of people steal her for a mission, Fellian is free for the first time in years--but also embroiled in a royalist plot.
Servant Mage is a masterpiece of being exactly as long as it needs to be. It takes concepts and plotlines that most authors would take three (or more) quite substantial fantasy novels to explore and wedges them into a terse little novella. Some of the wedging is done via the unlovely artifice of making Fellian incessantly ask questions, but it's well done overall. Both Fellian's miserable adolescence as a slave in mage training and her future trajectory after the bittersweet open-ended conclusion are efficiently sketched out in just a few paragraphs. Elliott also has some sophisticated worldbuilding that seems to have been deployed solely for this novel: a egalitarian revolution a few decades ago, mages untrained and reduced to lighting candles and acting as transport, a whole demon plane, a secret faction of monarchists plotting revenge. It's a lot of ground to cover.
A thoughtful and contemplative story--and a ridiculous amount of book per book. Personally, I might have preferred that this book be a novel-length standalone so the plot had a bit more time to breathe. But as someone who dislikes the bloat fantasy series are inclined to, I admire the skill and brevity on display here.
