I just finished reading City of Stone and Silence, book two of Django Wexler’s Wells of Sorcery series.
This series wears its influences plainly on its sleeve, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All the video game and anime energy swords, specific magic powers, actual minibosses and new swarms of enemies for the characters to hack and slash, it’s all very modern pulp. I quite like it, but I’m also a sucker for fantasy violence.
The first book focused entirely on Isoka, a criminal energy sword mage who got caught up in an Imperial plot to hijack a ghost ship, with her sister being threatened by powerful men in the Empire to ensure her compliance. In book two, we spend half of the chapters with Isoka’s sister, Tori, who turns out to be way less of a pawn than anyone in the first book might have expected. Her character arc over the course of the novel is the driving, changing force behind the story–Isoka has her own cool adventure in a dead city of the ancients, with her post-apocalyptic crew of wizards fighting undead and trying to deal with the city’s other time-displaced inhabitants, but most of her character development happened in the previous book, and this one is spent reinforcing things she already learned. It’s still a good read, mind you, but Tori’s chapters have something extra that made me just a little more excited every time they came up.
This really is quite a fun book. I’m eagerly anticipating the third novel in the series, where it’ll all finally come back together.