Freshly graduated from high school, Emma Lie has never let go the betrayal her father served her. On the eve of her college departure, burdened with grand designs, Emma finds herself branded by a strange mark. Bewildered by its appearance, Emma becomes distracted, then suspicious, of a captivating boy named Thies. Amid a passionate moment, she demands the truth from him. The cryptic answers Emma … cryptic answers Emma gets in return skew her reality forever.
Emma is thrust into the world of magic, stolen away from her home. Lofty intentions derailed, her mother in mortal danger, and forced into magical servitude, Emma must fight for survival and the life she had planned even as she battles for her own heart.
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I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Imagine if Hogwarts wasn’t the fortress of safety for youngsters learning to wield magic for the first time, but was instead a training facility not unlike that of the military, where those tapped with the ability of magic are called to battle those who threaten our world.
Imagine if you didn’t quite have a choice in your enrollment there.
While others stand in pride at their calling to this fight, Emma sees her carefully driven path for her future stripped away as she’s dragged to join the Legion, a magical militia whose secrecy has kept the rest of the world safe from harm. Despite trying to harden herself against the friendships around her and trying to ignore the allure of magic beyond her comprehension, Emma finds herself struggling between solving the mystery that ravages their school and desperately trying to return to her life in the outside world.
The world-building in this novel is, quite simply, massive. This is the kind of fantastical world that you can easily lose yourself in, one that the author has obviously plotted across many novels and, as explained, through the mouths of many characters to come. Since this story took place solely from Emma’s POV, she was the only character we truly got to know on a deeper level. If I had a complaint, it would certainly be that I felt we were lacking connection to the other characters by not being given much of their own motivations, outside of “the cause”. But with the author’s expressed intention of changing perspectives for future novels, I assume that we will learn more of the other characters we’ve met along the way.
If you enjoy the hum of magic in your veins, and like a story that develops in great depth and over time, this is definitely your kind of book. While certainly likened to a Potter-like world, this is definitely for an older generation, as there is some language and discussion of sex that younger readers (or their parents!) might not be thrilled with.
As much as I appreciate an author striving for an unique and complex world, The Call of Magic completely missed the mark if you ask me. It had a good start to the story, but that was it. It went downhill from there and never went up again.
I honestly don’t even know where to start to describe my experience with this story. It was just so … I’d say off, but it is kind of vague of an explanation. The writing made me confused. Not because it was overly complicated or had too big a words, but rather because, well it just didn’t make sense how some of the sentences were built and how the explanations were put forward. It also didn’t help how long the descriptions were of all the inconsequential and boring things like lessons but next to no build up or explanations to the things that actually mattered. One of those things being the characters.
The book was very good at dropping names left, right and center, so much so that it made the story messy and difficult to remember who was who. All the names didn’t mean much either when the characters with those names were as generic and one dimensional as paper clips. They had nothing to them to separate or relate to them. No emotions, no opinions, no nothing. The main characters, albeit having a bit more to them, weren’t far behind that pattern. There were no depth or development to them that the whole plot kind of fell flat. Even worse, the small personal traits I actually got from Emma irked me. She came across as very childish and petty to me. I mean, I get that her situation was bad and she was angry, but she took it out on the entire world and everyone involved, innocent or not. She seemed just to be bitter and melodramatic just because she could. It didn’t make sense to me why she was so cold and distant her entire life, mainly because it was never ever explained. It made even less sense as to how everyone was not only okay with her bad behavior but was awed by her.
A really big pet peeve for me is a Mary Sue character and Emma was just that. She was the most powerful for no reason or struggle whatsoever and everyone was remarking/complimenting her every chance they got, despite that she didn’t deserve it whatsoever. She constantly had eyes on her for being a special snowflake and it did not flow with me when she was so bitter and treated everyone the way she did. It annoyed me that everyone around her felt like they had to adapt to her, especially Theis. He constantly apologized and put her on a pedestal so much so that it kind of came across that he was her doormat and she was stringing him along. That along with their generic personalities in general gave a pretty dead romance that the only thing the story cold go for was love at first sight and leave it at that.
In general I lost all hope for this book even before I got halfway through since I couldn’t find much that I liked. Both plot and writing felt detached and drowned in unnecessary detail and descriptions while the characters were left as empty paper with a bitter Mary Sue front paper. Maybe it just me though. It just felt too forced and trying to be something it wasn’t. A positive thing I can say was the start to the story, so I can at least give it two stars.
I voluntarily read and reviewed a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I just couldn´t put the book down. And the world is so believable.