Mage's Blood (Moontide Quartet)

Product Information

This book had a blurb that promised a war that occurs every twelve years due to a specific tidal event and featured a world that bears a close resemblance to certain areas and historical aspects of our own.

On paper, the first installment of this new fantasy blockbuster hits all the right spots with setting, huge cast of characters and magic battles. Instead it put me in a months long reading funk just as I got conscripted inside my own apartment for my own health. Hair slowly builds the plot and the tension for every thread that leads towards a brutal climax sequence; the last quarter of Mage’s Blood was a 5-stars rating material. I went into this novel thinking it could be the next great “Grimdark” fantasy series, but instead it falls short but it does fit nicely into most epic fantasy.There's 4 types; Thaumaturgy (to do with elements), Hermetic (concerns living things), Theurgy (concerns the intangible and the animate) and finally Sorcery (concerns to intangible and inanimate). The storyline here is Kazim trying to get Ramita back, and Ramita eventually falling in love with her mysterious husband.

I overall enjoyed this one very much, and with some caveats, I recommend this to patient epic/historical fantasy readers. The Rondian emperor, overlord of the west, is hell-bent on ruling both continents, and for the last two Moontides he has led armies of battle-magi across the bridge on crusades of conquest, pillaging his way across Antiopa. The little passage about her “spying phase” was so out of character that I had an impression it was forced by an editor who might have shared my misgivings about the whole scheme. Suffice to say though, this book has it all: nations at war, clashing religions, political intrigue, mages and sorcery, multiple points of view.People do the worst evil when they do not have to take responsibility themselves but can blame others.

It lifts entire cultures, countries, and prejudices from our world and pretends it's high fantasy simply because it goes by new names. Yet, while no religion is safe from the wrath of the secular mind, the book is not devoid of quasi-religious preaching on many ideological issues deemed to be of importance by the author; the idea of the key magic artefact in the book which can effectively make something out of nothing defying the laws of logic (entirely unacceptable! It certainly tested my patience for a while, but the immersive capability of the engaging writing and the superbly written characterizations in Mage’s Blood impressively pulled me into Urte. So I felt like I wasn’t really taking a very big chance when I picked up the first volume, Mage’s Blood based primarily on all of the good publicity.

This is the meat of the story, and it is amazing how David Hair manages keep all the plates spinning at once, giving each character and plot thread the attention they deserve, while also meticulously bringing them all together so that they eventually form a much bigger picture. I know I sound bitter, and I would like to apologize to the many true fans of these books, but they truly missed the mark in my case. The magic of this book is fairly complicated so I will not explain it all now, but suffice to say the amount of magic and power you can possess depends on your lineage and blood.

When Ramita is taken away, Kazim goes berserk and later joins the shihad but of course things are not quite as they seem. People of color are discriminated against, homophobia is rampant (the word "cocksucker" was used with the subtlety of a toxic gamer), and the one intersex person that appears is treated as a vile, pitiable thing. This is even more evident, due to the fact that the timescale of the novel is essentially a countdown to the Moontide when (as Shaitarn put it), the excrement meets the rotating cool air device. Everything about every concept and character is pretty much explained at the moment of introduction. Mage’s Blood is massive in scope, and it features a lot of characters, but the third-person multi-perspective narration mainly revolves around Alaron, Elena, and Ramita.You will always be at the edge of your seat with anticipation and shocked when he drops in a huge twists. As the series name implies, Mage's Blood is only the first in what is meant to be series of four books, and as such there is much left wide open for huge things to come.