Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2005

Categories: Adult fantasy

LGBTQ representation: M/M, main character, his abuser and side characters, F/F, side characters

Summary: Felix Harrowgate is a dashing, highly respected wizard. But his aristocratic peers don’t know his dark past — how his abusive former master enslaved him, body and soul, and trained him to pass as a nobleman. Within the walls of the Mirador — Melusine’s citadel of power and wizardry — Felix believed he was safe. He was wrong. Now, the horrors of his previous life have found him and threaten to destroy all he has since become.

Mildmay the Fox is used to being hunted. Raised as a kept-thief and trained as an assassin, he escaped his Keeper long ago and lives on his own as a cat burglar. But now he has been caught by a mysterious foreign wizard using a powerful calling charm. And yet the wizard was looking not for Mildmay — but for Felix Harrowgate.

Thrown together by fate, the broken wizard Felix and the wanted killer Mildmay journey far from Melusine through lands thick with strange magics and terrible demons of darkness. But it is the shocking secret from their pasts, linking them inexorably together, that will either save them, or destroy them.

My Thoughts: Oh boy lol. This is going to be a wild one to review – take a scroll through this book’s Goodreads page and it’ll become immediately apparent that this is a book that seems to either really work for people or really, REALLY not work for them. I ended up landing somewhere in the middle with a rating of 2.5.

The good stuff first – the aesthetic is killer. Melusine is just full of all this lush, dark world-building, and the city itself truly feels like a mad, massive, ancient and labyrinthine (I spelled that right the first time btw!) place that is full of wizards and necromancers and forgotten ruins and cemeteries and ghosts. It does something that I love in fantasy novels – it drops these little offhand, random crumbs of lore that aren’t integral to the story but make it feel much more real.

Also, Mildmay is a great, great character. Every other word out of his mouth is “fuck” and his voice is so unique with plenty of slang and poor grammar and funny little asides and self-effacement. He is fundamentally a big old sweetie in spite of being trained to be an assassin; during the book, he more or less fulfils the trope of the thief with a heart of gold. There’s this part of the book early on where Felix is just suffering horrible abuse after horrible abuse, and it was so refreshing to switch over to Mildmay’s perspective, especially when he and Ginevra first have sex and he turns out to be more or less the only person in the book who cares about consent. He is also so fiercely protective of Felix, and it’s heartbreaking to see how sure he is that Felix thinks he is a monster and will want nothing to do with him when he’s healed. In short, Mildmay Fanclub, population: Charlotte.

Felix’s story seems to be the most polarizing aspect of this book amongst Goodreads reviewers, and it certainly is um…a lot, especially in the beginning when he gets raped twice on page by his cartoonishly evil former master. I tend to agree with the reviewers who say that the problem with his decision to self-sabotage and punish himself by returning to Malkor is not that it’s unrealistic but that it happens very suddenly at the start of the book and might make more sense if we had a little more context for their relationship. I’ve talked in previous books about the fine line between harrowing stories of trauma and misery porn (with Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey and The Farseer books by Robin Hobb) but Felix’s story is really one of utter and abject misery through and through – he is sold by his mother to be a kept thief and is abused by his Keeper, his only friend dies in a fire, and then he is sold to a brothel. Then he is sold to a sadistic master who abuses, rapes and tortures him for years, and he then returns to in a moment of self-loathing and is raped by him again. His magic is taken away, and he becomes insane, is locked in an asylum, is abused by the asylum staff and is then tortured by Robert in the asylum. Why????????

I’m not entirely sure if his PTSD is the same thing as his “madness,” in the book, but he definitely experiences extreme PTSD in addition to magical hallucinations and such, and then the “madness” is magically wiped away at the end of the book. I’d have to read on to see if he still experiences symptoms of trauma after the healing. I think it’d be extremely cheap if he didn’t, but I’m not really inclined to continue and find out. Narratively, I’m not sure how well this all works -you get rare sections where Felix does something interesting or is lucid (or both!), but for every one of those, it feels like there are dozens of short snippets where he describes how miserable and insane he is and then passes out.

And while I mentioned that the world is dripping with ambience, the actual world-building writing is done so strangely. For instance, Malkor breaks the Virtu before we even know what it is, and then it’s briefly described by Mildmay, who only vaguely understands it, and then Felix is insane so you never really get to understand what it is. There are factions of wizards and different countries and a Bastion somewhere, and while you can pick bits and pieces up using context clues, I think Monette could have been a little (or a lot) more clear in places. It kind of reminds me of my reading experience with The Broken Crown by Michelle Sagara in how vast and intricate and inscrutable the world is, but I accidentally read The Broken Crown without realizing that it’s the middle of a massive series while Melusine is the first in its series.

One thing I’ve realized about myself lately is that I really don’t care that much about plot or pacing, but even I noticed that it’s kind of a mess here – the first half is basically Felix getting repeatedly tortured while Mildmay hangs out with Ginevra, and then some stuff happens, and then the second half features Mildmay and Felix wandering around and traveling until they reach their destination. As a final point, I think it’d be good for future readers to know that this book is LGBT in the sense that Felix is gay and there are a few mentions of gay characters in the periphery – if you’re looking for a book that centrally features a queer romance or a strong couple, I’d look