The Outcast Mage

I picked this one up because I saw it in a B&N, really liked the cover, and thought it might be up my alley. It was. It's great to see publishers offering traditional epic fantasy again. I think there's a proven market for it.

The essence of this book is fine. I liked the ur-story of this book and finished in a fairly decent amount of time - as usual, I pecked through the first half for about a week and then binged the last half. Plot, characters, writing were all serviceable, engaging, and decent quality. The two romances were a bit haphazard but for the most part not cringey.

My issues with this one are in the dressings. I often find myself defending Sanderson's Elantris, because it came out in 2005, and relative to most fantasy published before 2005, it was doing something new with the short chapters, end-heavy structure, and weird cosmology and very modern-feeling approach to fantasy and magic. This book feels A LOT like Elantris, with the additional caveat that it came out twenty years later, is substantially less revolutionary, and doesn't have the explosive ending. It's entirely possible that this novel could have been a midlist offering in the late 2000s, or a high-placing SPFBO finalist these days. It's good, but it's not trying to do anything special, and that's fine. But I think modern epic fantasy these days has a mandate to try to do something with plot, and in terms of plot (and other aspects) this book falls short a bit, like many midlist books traditionally did.

Also, I personally have a slight distaste for Middle Eastern-inspired settings that include the food, culture, etc. and leave out the “bad parts” of the culture. I get why, but it feels half-baked.

Anyway, I like the dragons and I'll probably keep reading the series, but it's not going to the top of my favorites list.