A Sorcerer and a Gentleman by Elizabeth Willey

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A charming young sorcerer is unwillingly drawn into a war between feuding brothers, one of whom rules the empire of Pheyarcet, a realm whose magic is sourced from fire, and the other of whom rules his own creation of water-powered Argylle but who bitterly believes the throne of Pheyarcert should be his. The young sorcerer learns a few things he probably didn’t need to know. That thread doesn’t really get going, however, until about halfway through.

The story opens with Prospero, the exiled brother, and the first stage of his plan to invade Pheyarcet, which is to create a bunch of people, much to the dismay of his daughter, Freia. Then we meet the young son of the Emperor, who has just been seduced and sent into magical sleep by a sorcerer (our main character, eventually) for purposes revealed a little later.

Oooh, a gay prince, how interesting in a fantasy novel, I thought. Never mind, he’s not a main character and that thread hardly reappears even when he gets to meet the sorcerer again. Let’s move on to Otto, a brusque and short-tempered prince who has eloped with a duchess and who plans to marry her and use her resources to restore his kingdom to independence from the Empire. I think he also loves her but it’s hard to tell. He keeps clashing with an irritating sorcerer who likes flirting with his betrothed. Again, it’s Dewar, our sorcerer, and he develops enough of a friendship with Otto to want to voluntarily help in this first fight and then go on to fight Prospero’s invasion forces.

So you’d think Otto’s an important character and that friendship is quite important. Nope, not really, he’s another thread that gets more or less dropped without bothering to resolve anything that might have been raised by Dewar’s fickleness. I really liked Dewar, but I liked Otto, too, and I wanted to see how things went between them as their friendship developed, but things went nowhere. He was basically a plot device to explain why Dewar gets involved in a war that doesn’t in any way concern him.

If you’re getting the impression I think this book’s unfocused, you’d be right. It really does have some interesting ideas, decent dialogue (though sometimes, especially in the flirting scenes, forced), and characters who had such potential to be really interesting and complex, but it just flits all over the damn place until it finally settles down and decides it’s going to be about Dewar and his ambiguous relationship to Prospero and Prospero’s daughter. Not with the gay prince and not with Otto and his wife, but Prospero – over halfway through the book. This is also then underdeveloped.

Part of the problem, too, was that this is actually the second book set in this world (though the first book appears to be set after the events of this one), but little allowance was made for readers new to the world. I don’t like to have information dumped on me (who does), but at the same time, having to work out whether place names refer to cities, countries, places inside the current kingdom, places in another world in the same universe, places in another universe (it’s got a few minor SF concepts like different universes; or at least the impression I got was that there were multiple worlds available within three universes but I could well have been wrong) was just really distracting and eventually annoying enough that I had to start ignoring it. Same with how Roads and Lays and etc were supposed to work. I gathered enough to understand that characters could travel faster than normal at times, and gave up on trying to work out the under-structure of the world setup.

A second part of the problem was that after all the faffing around in the first half, the second half settles well into the story and then just finishes really abruptly without resolving very much at all. Turns out there’s a third book to finish the story, but I was given nothing here to really want to bother enough with it to seek it out. I’m not sure whether it was a deliberate move to try to eke out the story so that a three-book series would result, but if so, it was a failed gambit.

I think this book would work best for those who had already read the first one, and wanted to hear more about the events that lead up to it and how popular characters met and so on; this two-volume prequel might suit them to a T. It doesn’t work for new readers because it is too reliant on you having read the first one. More information about the author and other books here.