欧宝娱乐

Unsatisfying.

That's what I keep coming back to when I think about this book, as sad as that makes me. Every strength it has ends up being a weakness when promises go unfulfilled: the worldbuilding is intriguing, but raises so many questions it feels incomplete; relationships are hinted at but not resolved; characters receive sketchy outlines but don't get much depth; and the plot builds and builds for hundreds of pages but is resolved almost effortlessly at the end. Even the ending feels incomplete - the events of the climax actually promise far more interesting developments than anything else in the book, but there's no time for that to be explored at all.

I see what Nix was going for in trying to evoke The Three Musketeers, and there are times when that really works - something about the prose, in particular, which brings it to life - but he didn't quite hit the mark. Angel Mage is too close and too far from Dumas at the same time, and perhaps the best illustration of this is in the cast: we have a Dartagnan, a Rochefort, and a Cardinal, but they don't occupy their usual roles, and the four protagonists map somewhat - but not completely - onto the Musketeers, in a way that makes their almost-closeness more distracting than anything else. The exact audience that will be drawn to this book for its Dumas-esque style is the audience most likely to struggle with this not-quite-different-enough cast.

The plot failed what I think of as the 'reverse sandwich test' - the sandwich test being whether or not the reader will put the book down to wander away and make a sandwich; the reverse is whether the book is something the reader comes back to and genuinely wants to pick up. I just... didn't care enough to come back to it for weeks on end, and had to set aside time to dig in and make progress or I wouldn't have made any. When I sat down for an hour or so, it was interesting, and the pages flew by, but there's no real momentum to the plot drawing me back in. Events unfold at a glacial pace and without much of a sense of connection between one thing and another. It also doesn't help that our four protagonists are more reactive than active - and that brings me to what I suspect is the major failing in the plot architecture.

Liliath. She's the antagonist... and she's the first perspective we get. Throughout the book, she continues to get POVs, and so the reader always knows what her plans are, can always see how she's several steps ahead of everyone else. Not only does it rob the book of an element of mystery, but it makes it abundantly clear to the reader how much the protagonists don't do. Each step of their journey is orchestrated by Liliath, each choice anticipated to perfection (except at the very end, which doesn't feel earned because there's no rising action to support it) and they become less protagonists, more chess pieces. There's something interesting in watching a master manipulator at work, but even that is lost because, frankly, Liliath's scheming isn't actually very complex when you get right down to it, and it never quite feels like anything big is at stake.

The biggest missed opportunity, in my opinion, is Rochefort - a morally grey lesbian standing at the intersection of political and religious power, struggling with her sense of duty and a potential affection for someone she can't have a relationship with, a gifted mage with some unusual abilities which go wholly unexplained. (view spoiler)[Why is she the only one other than Dorothea who can see the shadows of Palleniel? We'll never know. (hide spoiler)] I admit I'm biased towards this type of powerful, conflicted character, but I felt she was deeply underused.

Speaking of underused: this magic system. It's interesting despite its flaws (especially the fact that Nix has the hierarchy of angels backwards), but it raises far, far more questions than the book deigns to address. For one thing, despite angels being very much a tangible force and organized in tiers according to Christian angelology, religion is a weird nonentity - there's a Cardinal, yes, but nobody seems to attend church, and the word 'God' literally does not appear in the text. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the of angelic magic: how does it work in areas like China and India, already major world powers around the era that it's set, where Christianity isn't the dominant religion? What about in the Islamic world, where portrayals of sentient beings is sometimes forbidden? And, as Dorothea asks at several points, how in the world was this magic discovered and developed?

There were plenty of small details I liked: the prose, as mentioned; the way Nix portrays a society pretty much free of racism and sexism; the inclusion of a variety of queer characters. But overall... those details don't make up for the overwhelming feeling that this book just didn't have much substance, at the end of the day.