'Darker Shade' Paints A Fantasy World Rich In Depth And Color
His opposite in every way is the book's other focus: Delilah Bard, an amoral Grey London pickpocket scrabbling to survive in poverty, but with all the freedom she wants, and a few more emotional connections than she'd like. Lila and Kell don't even meet until more than a quarter of the way through the book.
Up to that point, Schwab isn't just world-building, she's four-worlds-at-once building. In particular, she has to establish her peculiar and subtle rules of magic, equal parts manipulation of blood, will, and subtler factors like respect. (At one point, Kell accomplishes a difficult magical task essentially by begging the stones of a wall to cooperate.) But more significantly, she spends time with Kell, Lila, Holland, and their separate worlds, in no particular rush to tie them all together.
Her characters make the book. Just as Kell has layers, Lila is a satisfyingly rich invention: Single-minded, selfish, often unsympathetic, Lila would rather be a swashbucking pirate queen than a hero's arm-candy. Kell and Lila are as much rivals as allies, and when a dangerous smuggled artifact threatens all the remaining Londons, she's refreshingly interested in stealing it rather than destroying it. The plot comes late, but it comes naturally and easily, born out of the tensions between Holland's compulsions, Kell's reluctant sense of duty, and Lila's ambition.
Schwab also wrote the 2013 superhero deconstruction novel Vicious, and she writes young-adult and mid-grade fiction as Victoria Schwab. A Darker Shade Of Magic reads with the ease of a young-adult novel, with short paragraphs, quick-moving prose, and plenty of action. But it's grimmer even than the current bout of post-Hunger Games YA. Likeable characters die, badly. Torture, for pleasure or gain, happens frequently. The villains are monstrous, and the stakes are high, threatening all the worlds. But the stakes feel higher because Schwab takes the time to make a world worth getting lost in. Darker Shade Of Magic resolves its plot thoroughly, but still feels like it could be the seed of a lengthy series. With so many worlds on the map, there's plenty left to discover.
Tasha Robinson is a senior editor at The Dissolve.
Read an excerpt of A Darker Shade of Magic