TL;DR: A solid fantasy story with a strong character journey, The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick held my interest, even if I didn’t understand what was going on.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 3/4
Ren is a con artist, and she comes into town playing the long game of tricking a noble family to take her and her sister in, so that they’ll never be hungry or poor again. However, while her masquerade pulls her in deeper to the family, she finds she’s not the only one playing a game. With the fate of the city, the noble family, and herself on the line, she’ll find out there’s more to lose than a warm place to rest her head.
The imagery, the politics, and the intrigue in this book enticed me to give it a read. I liked the story and enjoyed the characters in it, but I wasn’t as clear on the world building as I would’ve liked. If it wasn’t integral to the plot, it wouldn’t have mattered, but because it was, I found myself a little disappointed at the end. I enjoyed it, but there was something lacking. For that and more, I gave it 3.75 stars.
The Plot
Ren is a con artist. She arrives in Nadezra to worm (or con) her way into a rich noble family and secure her and her sister’s future. Everything is going to plan until it doesn’t.
What Ren failed to realize is that there is more afoot in Nadezra than she thought and more lives at stake than just her home and her sister’s. Around every corner, her past haunts her. When she’s not faking her way into high society, she’s being wooed by her ‘cousin’, Leato Traementis, who’s geniune warmth creates conflict in what she is doing and why.
As tensions in the city heat up between the rich and the poor, it becomes clear to Ren that there’s more than just a long con at stake. Children disappear and nightmare magic takes hold. Can Ren survive her entanglement and be saved by the Traementis family? Or will her con and the nightmares unleashed in the city be her undoing?
What I liked & liked less
I enjoyed this book. The story had a good pace, Ren’s journey and obstacles made sense, and her character arc was good. I also found the other characters to be unique and well-fleshed out.
Ren had a good backstory, which we weren’t just told about, but that she experiences as well through flashbacks, dreams and fears. She’s loyal and has a good heart, even if she’s determined to get a better place in life through fraud. Her journey is bumpy and her reactions realistic based on what she experiences.
The secondary characters were three-dimensional, although we saw less of them than Ren. The authors touched on a few of them through POV scenes and chapters, but there wasn’t enough of each of them to be as deep as I would’ve liked. The “good” guys and the “bad” guys had strong motivations, and the characters were fleshed out. I also like that there is a morally gray character, Vargo. I’m interested to see where his journey takes him, but I don’t know that I’m interested enough to read the trilogy.
The setting and the contrast between the rich and the poor were well-laid out. I liked that the divide wasn’t just based on wealth but also race and religion. It gave more conflict, not just to the story, but for the characters who had to navigate it to get information. The differences in culture created a more intricate world as well and echoed to some of the same troubles that plague our world today.
My biggest complaint is the world building (the magic an the religious aspects, specifically) and how unclear it was. I could’ve missed the important pieces earlier in the book where things were explained, but I don’t think so. And the problem is that the world building is critical to the external plot. It was never sufficiently explained so that we understood the factors at play, the mythology behind it, and why this feature was more important than that one.
So, while I enjoyed the story, I didn’t understand some of what was going on and the conflicts at the heart of it. This left me feeling lukewarm about the book, although it was good enough that I finished it.
To Sum Up (Too Late!)
The character journey, political intrigue, the many mysteries, and the setting created a book that kept me reading, even when I was confused by what was happening (world building). I liked the characters, rooted for their successes or failures, and was intrigued as to where they’d go next. However, I’m not intrigued enough to read the next book in the series because I failed to understand how the world fit together enough for a critical part of the external plot. For all those reasons and more, I gave it 3.75 stars.
About the Authors
M.A. Carrick is the joint pen name of Marie Brennan (author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent) and Alyc Helms (author of the Adventures of Mr. Mystic). The two met in 2000 on an archaeological dig in Wales and Ireland — including a stint in the town of Carrickmacross — and have built their friendship through two decades of anthropology, writing, and gaming. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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This fills in the Authors Uses Initials square on my Fantasy Bingo 2022 card.