A Darker Shade of Magic

I have been known to judge books by their covers before. Part of the fun of being a fantasy fan is that it’s one of three genres (the others being romance and science fiction) where the covers and overall aesthetics tend to be taken quite seriously because they are big selling points. As such there are plenty of fantasy books that I have bought due to how they look. I’d had my eyes on A Darker Shade of Magic, the first book in V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy for a while now simply because of how good the box set for the trilogy looked. Finally I gave into my impulses and bought it.

The result is a pretty good, if imperfect one! This is the second book from Schwab that I’ve read, the first being The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I think Addie LaRue was pretty perfect for what it was trying to be, but Schwab is more ambitious here. It’s the first book in a trilogy and as such she needs to set up multiple threads to keep the reader interested while also making a story that works well on its own. In these two areas I’d say she didn’t really succeed in the first but did succeed in the latter. Had I not known that this was a trilogy I would have thought this was a good stand-alone work. As it stands I’m not sure where Schwab goes with the series in the next two installments and I’m not sure I’m even that interested. That is a problem, although it has nothing to do with this book.

As I just said, I do think this works as a standalone. This is because Schwab’s pacing is overall quite good. A lot happens within 400 pages and that’s not even including the worldbuilding that she does in order to make anything the characters do make sense at all. If there is anything that Schwab does truly amazing in this book it is this. At no point did I feel lost. The worldbuilding is really strong and I feel like everything within the story makes sense within the rules that have been established. This is the #1 rule of fantasy and Schwab nails it.

Along the way we do meet a couple of fun characters. Kell is a pretty typical angsty bad boy of a protagonist but Lila works really well to balance him out and the interactions they have make the story worth following.

All in all this is a good book that I would recommend to any fantasy fan. While I am not necessarily excited to read the sequel, I do have it due to my aforementioned tendency to buy books based on their covers. We’ll see if Schwab proves me wrong.