But the stakes feel higher because Schwab takes the time to make a world worth getting lost in. The villains are monstrous, and the stakes are high, threatening all the worlds. Torture, for pleasure or gain, happens frequently. But it's grimmer even than the current bout of post- Hunger Games YA. A Darker Shade Of Magic reads with the ease of a young-adult novel, with short paragraphs, quick-moving prose, and plenty of action.

Schwab also wrote the 2013 superhero deconstruction novel Vicious, and she writes young-adult and mid-grade fiction as Victoria Schwab. The plot comes late, but it comes naturally and easily, born out of the tensions between Holland's compulsions, Kell's reluctant sense of duty, and Lila's ambition. Kell and Lila are as much rivals as allies, and when a dangerous smuggled artifact threatens all the remaining Londons, she's refreshingly interested in stealing it rather than destroying it. Just as Kell has layers, Lila is a satisfyingly rich invention: Single-minded, selfish, often unsympathetic, Lila would rather be a swashbucking pirate queen than a hero's arm-candy. The book's opening protagonist, an Antari named Kell, thinks of them by color: Grey London, a mundane place where magic is scarce Red London, his home, a warm place of copious magic White London, a brutal world starving for resources, magic included and Black London, an obliterated world consumed by greed for magic.

Only the Antari - the increasingly rare people born with magic in their blood - can naturally traverse these worlds, so they serve as liaisons between the rulers of the three surviving Londons. Schwab's backdrop involves four parallel worlds with four parallel Londons, each with a different history, ruler, and society. The book could have been compulsively readable even without a major conflict - like Katherine Addison's recent standout fantasy novel The Goblin Emperor, A Darker Shade Of Magic is set in a world idiosyncratic enough that it doesn't need to be threatened to be compelling. She builds a setting elaborate and unfamiliar enough that it matters once the familiar tropes start threatening it. Once the main arc finally slips fully out of the shadows, it turns out to be fairly standard for a fantasy novel: Evil scheming magicians, cursed and forbidden item, dark magic ready to consume everything it touches.īut Schwab takes her time in getting there. Schwab's second adult novel, A Darker Shade Of Magic, is how long it takes to develop a plot. One of the most compelling things about V.E. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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The darker shades of magic