Review: Cold Magic, by Kate Elliott

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Tue Feb 26 19:47:21 PST 2019


Cold Magic
by Kate Elliott

Series:    Spiritwalker #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: September 2010
ISBN:      0-316-08085-3
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     502

Cat Barahal is a scholarship college attendee, a lucky and fairly
precarious position given that the college is mostly for the nobility
and only reluctantly admits women. She and her cousin Bee are
inseparable, both keeping the other's secrets. For Bee, that's her
occasionally prophetic dreams; for Cat, that's her ability to hear
things that should be inaudible and wrap her surroundings around her to
disappear. Before her parents died, her mother told Cat to never let
anyone know what she could do. Bee is the only exception she's ever
made.

Although her adoptive family's finances are tenuous, Cat's life isn't
bad. She is fascinated by her father's journals and re-reads them
regularly, thrives in school, and is mostly successful in navigating
the infuriating restrictions of class and gender, despite her temper.
But then her life is turned upside down: a cold mage, one of the
aristocratic rulers of her world, arrives at her home and demands her
in marriage as the price of a contract she'd never heard of before. In
short order, she finds herself married by magic and carried away by a
strange man who appears to hold her in contempt, left only with
instructions from her aunt and uncle to obey.

Cold Magic starts out looking like it's going to be steampunk with
magic. Cat and Bee's world feels very Victorian, with gender
segregation, an emphasis on clothing, and servants as a mandatory
aspect of life for anyone who even pretends to acceptability. But this
world feels less and less like typical steampunk as the story goes on.
There's some serious world-building work below the surface.

Relative to our world, Cat's is in an ice age, with a land bridge
between what we would call England and France. The ice to the north is
the domain of fairy, and thus is even more treacherous than is in our
world. Politics are divided between feudal lords, local princes (the
formation of modern nation-states appears to have been delayed in this
world), and the incredibly powerful cold mages. Technology is on the
rise, but the cold mages, with some help from the entrenched nobility,
are doing what they can to suppress it. Sometimes literally: fires, and
therefore a lot of steam-driven machinery, die in the presence of a
sufficiently powerful cold mage. The resulting political world is
multi-faceted and complicated even before the wildcard of fairy is
thrown into the mix.

On top of the magical politics, Elliott does some interesting work with
alternate history. Cat and Bee are Kena'ani (Phoenicians, as the hated
Romans call them), which in this world have a marginal social role
somewhat like that of Jews in our world. When they were driven from
their historical cities (by the Persians here, not the Romans), the
Kena'ani became the trading backbone of the European world. That, in
turn, led to them becoming the spymasters and information brokers, and
therefore both necessary and disreputable among the elites. Those
elites are a mix of Celts and Mande, the latter bringing their powerful
magic to Europe in a diaspora from North Africa in the aftermath of the
salt plague and the rise of ghouls.

My one-sentence summary of Elliott's alternate history is "what if most
major historical conflicts were fought to a draw." The Roman Empire
still exists towards the east, but never managed to completely defeat
Carthage. The Celts were never driven out to the margins of Europe.
Mande speakers are a major political force. I really liked this world:
it's fascinatingly different in a way that feels lived-in, and Elliott
wisely avoids getting into the specifics of divergent events. The one
thing that did raise an eyebrow is that North America is the home of a
parallel intelligent race Cat's people call "trolls" but which are
actually bipedal birds (evolved from dinosaurs). They're interesting
(and very likable) characters in the story, and full equals of the
humans, but making the natives of North America exotic and literally
non-human does not have a great history.

Cold Magic is in shape a fairy story. Cat is suddenly forced into a
world with elaborate and very dangerous rules, of which she knows
nothing, and has to learn on her feet before she dies. For about half
of the book, she's dragged along behind Andevai, an arrogant ass who
gets furious at her for every rule she accidentally breaks. For much of
the rest, she's making her own way across unfamiliar territory and
cultures, constantly struggling to learn enough to avoid disaster. This
could be frustrating to read, but Elliott pulls it off by giving Cat a
temper, a clear understanding of how unfair this is, and an over-sized
dose of audacious determination. She absolutely refuses to be cowed,
even when she's apparently alone and without allies, which makes this
far more rewarding to read than it would be otherwise.

It helps that the pacing is excellent. Elliott lingers a bit too long
on Cat's angst in a few places, but otherwise this 500 page book keeps
moving. We get a new encounter, a new bit of world-building, a magical
confrontation, or a new bit of political complexity every few pages,
and yet the story never feels out of control. Cat's has a strong
first-person voice and, despite her angst, stays clear on her immediate
goals and her unwillingness to become a pawn. I liked her and had no
trouble rooting for her throughout. Also appealing is the deep
undercurrent of revolution and change throughout the story, an
undercurrent that is happening independently of the main characters and
creates the feeling of a deeper political history in the world.
(Including, intriguingly, this world's analogue of Napoleon, who seems
much more likable than our version.)

Also, while I won't say more to avoid spoilers, I loved the cats. That
was my favorite scene in the story.

Cold Magic is not as tight and crisp as it could be. It sprawls a bit,
occasionally belabors Cat's emotional and identity crises, and is the
first book of a trilogy in a way that means it falls short of a
satisfying conclusion. It also becomes obvious by the end of the book
that the forced marriage is going to turn into a romance, and while
Elliott does quite a lot to redeem Andevai over the course of the book,
I would have preferred to not have that subplot. Cat deserves a lot
better, even apart from the violation of consent at the start. But I
had so much fun with this book. It kept me up late several nights and
pulled me away from other entertainment to read just one more chapter,
and maybe that's what matters the most.

Recommended. I'm definitely reading the rest of this series.

Followed by Cold Fire.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-02-26

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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