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language: English
country: USA
year: 1990
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Children of the Triad, #2
dates read: 6.6.23-8.6.23
Laurie Marks’s The Moonbane Mage is the second of her Children of the Triad series, sequel to Delan the Mislaid. it is, in part, the necessary dialectical antithesis to Delan the Mislaid (a The Tombs of Atuan to the Delan’s A Wizard of Earthsea): where before we had an evil Walker sorcerer planning genocide against the Aeryies to steal their technology, now we have an evil Aeyrie mage planning to destroy the Triad — the one interspecies community in the world — and incite a race war between Walkers and Aeyries in order, it seems, to secure Aeyrie dominance.
the evil mage Raulyn’s attempts to do this center around Laril, a still newly-adult Aeyrie, the unknowing child of Delan but raised by Delan’s surviving biological parent as ids own. Raulyn has manipulated Laril into exiling idreself from ids community and “happening” upon Raulyn’s tower, where id initially falls in love with Raulyn — or is made to fall in love with Raulyn — and only slowly comes to realize that Raulyn has trapped idre in an abusive relationship predicated on Raulyn’s complete control over Laril’s life. during this time, Raulyn enlists idre to recreate an explosive substance — gunpowder, the titular “moonbane” (based on one of Laril’s nightmares) — and to produce weapons that use it, with which Raulyn intends to accomplish ids goals.
as Laril realizes that id is being abused, id befriends and ultimately falls in love with Raulyn’s other prisoner-slave, a Walker named Bet, and the two of them go through a cycle of escape, recapture, and escape again. when they’re finally reunited, they use their (in Laril’s case newly-discovered) magic to defend the Triad and defeat Raulyn.
I liked a lot of things about this! reading it did make me think that part of why I didn’t think Delan the Mislaid succeeded as fully as it intended to is the pacing. the pacing of The Moonbane Mage is better, I think, but I found it a bit less conceptually rich than Delan the Mislaid, in part, I think, simply because the moonbane part of the plot disappears about three quarters of the way through: Raulyn finds another way to get the power id’s seeking and the moonbane becomes (explicitly) irrelevant. given that the title of the book is The Moonbane Mage, I think this was a weird choice, and it means that the book’s (good!) meditations on war, violence, and the social implications of new technologies kind of disappear. the result is that the second half, and especially the last quarter, of the book is focused mainly on the nature of abuse, the way it affects Laril and Bet — but in a way that just didn’t feel as fully fleshed out as I would have liked.
(I also would have liked to see a bit more development of Bet and Laril’s relationship — perhaps there will be more in the third book, but I’m not sure how urgently I feel moved to read it; I might take a break for some other things, aside from the other two books I’m in the middle of.)
moods: dark, hopeful, tense