Yay or Nay? Shades of Magic Series (Spoiler free) (Book)

Happy Friday! Are you all excited for your weekend plans? Cause me and Meghan sure are! We are gonna turn into a pair of sassy Russian figure skaters after all :-p

But moving onto the topic of the blog post today - I feel like I haven't written about any books in a long while on here. So today i will tell you about an awesome fantasy series that I just finished, namely the Shades of Magic series. It has parallel worlds, thieves, and magic so you know you're in for a good time!

Below is the synopsis to the first book, The Darker Shade of Magic:

Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.

Kell was raised in Arnes—Red London—and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling between the frequent bloody regime changes in White London and the court of George III in the dullest of Londons, the one without any magic left to see.

Unofficially, Kell is a smuggler, servicing people willing to pay for even the smallest glimpses of a world they'll never see. It's a defiant hobby with dangerous consequences, which Kell is now seeing firsthand.

After an exchange goes awry, Kell escapes to Grey London and runs into Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations. She first robs him, then saves him from a deadly enemy, and finally forces Kell to spirit her to another world for a proper adventure.

Now perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, they'll first need to stay alive.

My Thoughts:

If I could compare this series to Harry Potter, it would go something like this

A Darker Shade of Magic would be Philosopher's Stone, where you get introduced to the main characters and have a basic understanding of the world and have a fairly neatly wrapped story where you expect more to come later.

A Gathering of Shadows is like Goblet of Fire, with a fun competition most of the story, but a promise of a dark threat.

A Conjuring of Light is Deathly Hallows. Super dark, a lot of shit happens and your heart hurts knowing that you won't get more stories from these characters.

I really must say that the characters were a huge stand out in this series. They all had such unique quirks and I could not imagine them being written by anyone other than V.E. Schwab. My favourites were Kell, Alucard, and Hastra! The dialogues between them were genius as well and the banter was frequent. Those moments being interchanged with action-packed moments with amazingly written combat scenes. I feel like the author must have been involved in some knife fights in back alleys to know this much about wielding weapons in that amount of detail.

One criticism I have is that some information about how the world works does take a long time to learn. For example, some things that I was wondering about weren't revealed until the last book. This is somewhat good as it avoids info dumping in the first book, but it make the first book seem not as rich and exciting as the latter two.

Overall though, the excellent writing, dialogues and character make reading this series a magical experience full of excitement and adventure. I highly recommend you give these a read.

~Olga