Characters. My favorite point of view was probably Maleonarial. He was the mage that raged against the injustice that the goddess takes part of a mages life in exchange for magic. They die early deaths. Maleonarial goes on a quest to kill her and take back the stolen futures of his kind. He was a kind soul but also knew what needed to be done. He mourned but didn’t hesitate to do what was right. I admired that. Kaitealyon is a Daughter of the goddess. They speak with her authority in different holds. I liked her. She was a mother and protected her son at all costs. She had this sense of almost super-hero like honor when it came to Tananen (the land they live in). There were also side character POV that were fun to read about.

Plot. The plot was my favorite part of the whole book. The fact that there is magic but it comes at a very high price. A twenty-seven year old that has used magic since he was fifteen would look like he was eighty. I really liked the magic system. I loved that writing words with your intention could produce something beautiful (or in Cil’s case, something horrible). They not only have to write the right words but have the right feelings behind them. And the plot twist at the end about the goddess was A+! And the eaters were a pretty scary threat. They ate magic and could take over people’s bodies! That Maleonarial and Kaitealyon had to team up against this threat was epic!

Writing. I had a really hard time being drawn into this book because of the writing. It was written very differently than what I used to. While I can appreciate the uniqueness, it wasn’t exactly my flavor. It seemed choppy and really hard to read. I often had to re-read sentences and paragraphs to understand what was going on.

Final Thoughts. This stand alone was hard to read but I loved the plot so much! Everything about this book was extremely unique!

I was really excited to get into this book. The premise sounded incredibly interesting; a Deathless Goddess where mage scribes write her spells in exchange for premature aging and if the spell holds they make something; but if it fails because their intention is flawed a gossamer (a strange uncontrollable thing) comes to be instead. Once I got into the book I found myself really enjoying the prose. It's almost poetic or lyrical. While this made for a beautifully written story, it at times made it challenging for me to read in more than little bits.

So I treated the book like a snack. One I would open and enjoy little bites at a time. Snacking between points of view from the mages to a woman who cannot write the spells but can hear the words of the Deathless Goddess. The book struck me as being similar to folklore or fairytales where you don't always get full contextual details to what is transpiring. A lot of the story isn't explained to the reader but left open for them to fill in. For me this doesn't put me off a book, I quite often enjoy this level of storytelling. I like mystery and magic where story lines intersect. I left the book wanting a little more. There was some fantastic world building but the characters blended together for me at times. With a little more individual identities I feel like I would have been more satisfied with the book as a whole. Instead I feel like I was left with pieces to savor after I finished.

I feel like this is one of those books where there is little middle ground to the final impression. Readers will either love this or find it hard to follow. It's worth a read for those that enjoy fantastical magic and I feel readers who liked Strange the Dreamer will be attracted to this book.

This tale has a very interesting premise, to be sure! In this world, the Deathless Goddess has gifted some people with the ability to magically write specially designed things into being, in exchange for aging prematurely – if their intention holds up with what they’re trying to make. If that intention is flawed, they’ll make a gossamer – a creature, sometimes strange, and usually quite harmless, but uncontrollable. Wonderous, at the least.

Sick of the premature aging aspect of magic, the mage scribe Maleonariel decides that he is going to find the Deathless Goddess and end her. But, the Deathless Goddess isn’t the only being on the scene. Something (or somethingssss) evil is lurking in Tiler’s Hold, and they might be after the goddess herself.

This was a very well written book! I loved the prose. The story flowed really well, and this book was quite easy to read, in that it was never too difficult to either read it in large spurts, or littler bits in between spurts of working. I sometimes found that the story wasn’t capturing my attention all the way, but by the middle of the story, that seemed to have stopped happening, as I was more immersed with it. By the end, I liked this book a lot.

We see this tale from several points of view. Firstly, there is of course Maleonarial, who is a mage who has lived alone and isolated for twelve years. We also see the story from the point of view of Kait, who is one of the Daughters (of the goddess. It’s metaphorical). She can hear the goddess’s words. Men can write them but not understand them. Women can understand them but not write them. We also see some of the story from the POV of Pylon, who is a kind of noblewoman from the hold in which the evil shenanigans are going down.

The only part of it that really kind of blocked me from enjoying my time with it more than I did was that some characters have very heavy accents that are very apparent in their dialogue. Now, this might be just a nitpick on my part, but what is, I’m sure, intentionally meant to be an immersive use of language was the opposite for me. Totally broke my immersion because I would stumble over words that were all shoved together with apostrophes. C’est la vie, I suppose!~

But, all told, in the end I liked this book quite a lot! The prose, and the way that the whole thing ended up really won me over. So, I can definitely say I had 4/5 stars of a good time with this one. I think that some people will like it more than others, but I’d certainly recommend it to anyone who likes the idea of magic via writing.

Thanks to the author, as well as DAW via NetGalley for the review copy!

I admit it took me awhile to get through this. It was an interesting read with an intriguing conflict and premise, but the intricacies were hard to follow and nearly tedious at times. To keep names straight in the beginning, when each character uses at least four different names and titles, was nearly impossible. Various terms for the land and certain types of gossamers were also hard to keep track of. I think that was why it took me so long to finally push myself to finish. The author was thorough and very detailed, which I hate to complain about, but it was so much so that it weighed down the plot heavily and made it confusing, difficult to decipher, and slow. But I do want to applaud the thorough worldbuilding, magic system, and huge group of three dimensional characters.

This is one of those reads where the plot is interesting it just took way too long for me to understand it.

“The Gossamer’s Mage” reads like a lost fairy tale or Greek myth with young men who possess magic gifted by the goddess find that the price of said magic is their youth but when a young mage is found to be creating monsters the journey begins to put an end to the threat only to learn that it hides closer to home.

This book was a struggle to jump into and there was more than one moment in the first quarter of the book where I wanted to quit because I couldn’t figure out what was happening. There’s a lot of shifting povs in this book, which has around 6 chapter total, which makes it more difficult to keep track of the characters and the plot to the point that I thought it might have been an anthology between chapters 1 & 2 only to slowly see how it was all weaving together.

Once getting out of that rough patch it actually became fascinating but at that point I was too far into the book for that to save my opinion of it. I enjoyed parts of the resolution but it wrapped up way too quickly, just when the climax was amping up I blinked and it was over and though the ending wasn’t bad it just seemed like we could have taken out parts in the middle to give us room at the end for it to breathe.

This is a book I’m going to keep flip flopping on in terms of how I feel about it but overall it’s just okay.

**special thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Summary:

The world’s only remaining magic is in Tananen, where only women can speak the Deathless Godess’ language, and only men can write her spells – both at a terrible cost. But now something dangerous and dark has come into Tiler’s Hold, destroying magic creations, and silencing the Goddess.

Review:

Julie Czerneda’s been one of my favorite authors for years. Yet I haven’t been excited by her recent books. Have my tastes changed? Has her writing? Have her editors given her too much leeway? The Gossamer Mage doesn’t answer that question, but it also doesn’t go against the trend.

Czerneda made her name in part by writing credible SF. Writing fantasy isn’t new to her, though somehow with the press of work, etc., I haven’t actually gotten around to reading her two prior fantasy books. Czerneda has imagination and skill, and, the fantastic elements of the book work. The world is interesting, fairly original, satisfyingly magical, etc.

Where the book falls through is mostly in the mechanics. We switch from character to character, but most of them start at the same place and deal with similar issues, and I often found it hard to remember which was which. In theory, the three lead characters all have clear and distinct roles, but I found their voices very similar.

There are interludes that are mean to break up the text and give us some outside perspective and worldbuilding information, but I found them both repetitive and too vague to be useful. There just wasn’t enough context overall for me to build up a clear hypothesis about what was happening and why – often key to this kind of ‘mysterious origins’ story.

The ending exacerbates the problem. It ties things up emotionally, but it doesn’t really try to explain what’s been happening or how it all came about. There are loads of hints, but they lead to … nothing in particular. I don’t think it’s because I missed subtlety and nuance; it’s because Czerneda had a chance to explain, and simply decided not to. The result is intensely dissatisfying. This is where a more demanding editor could have come into play, which is at least the second time I’ve said that recently about a Czerneda book. It’s disappointing, not least because this could have been a satisfying book – all the pieces are there. And it should have been one.

Sometime soon, I’ll go back to actually read the Night’s Edge books, and see whether, 6 years back, those turned out better.