Mana Mirror

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first public ebook.

Blurb

When Malachi Baker stumbles into an offer of apprenticeship from the esteemed and powerful Occultist Orykson, he’s left in shock and jumps at the chance to learn… Even if it means taking out a few loans.

Unfortunately, his new teacher sees him more as a tool than a student, and has set Malachi near-impossible goals before he becomes worthy of Orykson’s full attention, and Malachi’s innate power is only somewhat above average.

Worse, it turns out that Orykson has enemies more powerful than Malachi had ever imagined – and now their attention has landed solidly on him.

Torn between the mage who can offer him everything, and a strange old woman who offers him the chance to guide his own path, Malachi is left scrambling to find his purpose as a new mage.

What to expect:

• Slowburn to Power
• Slice of Life
• Queer Content

Thoughts

Every now and then we get a post to /r/ProgressionFantasy or LitRPG where the poster is all “No LGBT!” To those people, I cannot think of a worse book to recommend. Not only is the MC transitioning female-to-male with the power of magic, but numerous other characters in the book are LGBT+ or outside the colour gamut entirely. And—to be clear—the book isn’t political at all, because the LGBT+ minorities are perfectly normalised in the setting. Apart from it being a goal of the MC’s to find magic to aid with transitioning, it’s not a driving plot point. It’s just part of the character, in the same way anything else is. I enjoyed that.

So, the MC has a few goals, but what of the wider plot? I think this is the slowest part of the story to get moving (slowburn is highlighted in the blurb for many reasons). The pacing increased at about the halfway point in book one, and the last 20% of the book felt much tighter. It was only towards the end where both the larger jumps in power progression occured, and the author provided some much needed point-of-view interludes from othe great powers as to where the global plot is going.

To that end, I definitely enjoyed the second half of the book in its tighter pacing, while the first half of the book was a much more relaxed, slice-of-life feel where Malachi learns spells and completes contracts to earn some much-needed money.

In terms of characterisation, you’ve got another oddity in the genre: a genuinely supportive family. But to me, the highlights were the great powers that we meet ever so briefly. I want to know so much more about them, and even more importantly, how Orykson reacts to them to dig into his character more. Is the man justified in his actions and pursuit of power? Is he an phsychotic egomaniac? Or perhaps a misunderstood teddy-bear? (Okay it’s not the last one… I’m pretty sure.)

The magic system reminds me a lot of Weirkey, in that everyone has a mana garden in which they plant things (aka spells). I’ll admit though that I got a bit confused over all of this initially, because in addition to one’s internal mana-garden, the MC has a literal garden they’ve planted mana-producing plants in (to harvest mana from) and in my stupefied reading at 4am I initially got the two separate concepts confused as one. Don’t make my mistake! This is all clarified much better later in the book when Malachi takes a potion to enter his internal mana garden to work on the spells he’s been mastering and ingraining. A disambiguiation like Sarah Lin does at the back of her Weirkey books might be handy though for future works.

Fans of Arcane Ascension (or any of Rowe’s works), Millenial Mage, or even Forge of Destiny will should look to read this story.