⋙ Download The Sentinel Mage The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Emily Gee 9781907519505 Books

The Sentinel Mage The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Emily Gee 9781907519505 Books

Download As PDF : The Sentinel Mage The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Emily Gee 9781907519505 Books

The Sentinel Mage The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Emily Gee 9781907519505 Books

This is what I think of as an old school fantasy the bad guys are bad but not complex, the good guys are good just misunderstood, the Prince is a little bit snotty and the stoic Princess is sold off into a marriage she didn’t want. There is a curse has been awakened in the land and it is slowly spreading. It rips the humanity away from men and women who drink the tainted water until they kill everything and everyone they love.

This is a cookie cutter fantasy that really relies on a lot of tropes that I would expect more in a historical fiction novel than a new fantasy realm. Honestly if you took out the fire burning/shapeshifting/healing mages and curse it is just the run of the mill historical fiction novel.

But that said I flew through the book. While I didn’t find the writing really original it is very well done, the story moved along quickly and the pages just flew by easily. Much if it was fairly predictable and I believe it could have clipped out maybe 100 pages or so of unneeded repetition, but since the chapters are so short and clip between three different people and their situations it isn’t really noticeable.

Most of the book is spent on the run with Prince Harkeld after he finds out that he is the only person who can stop a curse that is spreading across the land. The king wants to use Harkeld to gain power and force other kingdoms into submission, but Harkeld wants to stop the curse as soon as possible so that the people do not suffer.

I want to like Harkeld because he is the hero and he just left his entire life behind to save people but I struggled with him. He has so many prejudices against the mages he is traveling with. So much so that the only solution is for four of the mages guarding him to take turns shapeshifting to look like a normal armsman from the isles in order to guard Harkeld. The shapeshifter that is tasked with this the most is Innis a very talented mage in her own right and as predicted she starts to have conflicting feelings for the prince even when wearing the guise of a man. It’s been done and been done better but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it still.

Most of the Harkeld storyline is spent running from the king and traveling to the first stone that needs to be destroyed. Harkeld is also trying so hard to deny the mage blood in him. His prejudices run so deep that he starts to hate himself and the potential that he may have to be a mage. He calls them witches and repeats absolutely ridiculous stories that he has heard about the mages. It took entirely too long for some of those to dissipate but I have some hope that will be better in the next book.

The other two story lines are much smaller. Princess Britta is forced into an arranged marriage with a horrible man. As she deals with the truth of her predicament and the horrible atrocities her father is willing to commit she finds a way to contribute. I liked Princess Britta, she was kind and while she made some decisions that I maybe didn’t agree with in the story to deal with her situation they were understandable. The other characters in her story Karel and Yasma also fall into a precarious position with the Princess, but I loved their dedication to her because of the type of person she was not what her title is.

Jaume’s is the final PoV and he didn’t get much time at all in this installment but I think he will play a much larger role in the next. He is a child from an area hit by the curse. Escaping only barely with his life, he is traveling the land trying to stay ahead of the curse. His tale is one of the mood of the common person of the land and how they are coping.

The ending I found extremely predictable. I was sure how it was going to go down at about the middle part of the book. But I was still entertained and grew too really like a few of the characters, Innis the talented mage being my favorite. She has a lot of potential and I enjoy the budding something that is between her and Harkeld.

Had I read this in 2011 when it first came out I might have liked it more, but with so many other fantasies out there that really push the good/evil balance of their characters I’m not as engaged by a book where people are just straight up good or evil with no inflections into their characters motivations.

I’ll wait to pass judgment on the series until after reading The Fire Prince, the next book in this series.


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The Sentinel Mage The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Emily Gee 9781907519505 Books Reviews

I wrote my reviews out of order as this is the first book, but to keep up with my general theme, this is an excellent start to a series you won't be able to put down! Loved the writing, characters and story! Top-notch fantasy!
This was a solid old-school fantasy novel. The beginning felt uninspired with plodding writing, flat characters, and unconvincing motivations. However, near the halfway point the story really picked up. Things got more interesting and original, and I stayed up way too late, in order to find out happened. I'm still not very excited about the prince hero, but the heroine is growing on me. I also liked Britta's side story. The descriptions of the desert settings were vivid and effective, as was the minor sub-plot of an eight year old boy, on the run from the curse. The author does need to watch out for too much repetition with scenes, and I'd like to see the characters grow and change more. Hopefully that will come in the following two books. Despite my complaints, the plot did finally really engage me, and I've bought the second book to see how things unfold.
good and evil collide in the magical world where the curse is killing population via poisonous water. We have several magical beings fighting for the good side, little kid trying to survive, princess and her guard trying to make it among traitorous court and family and reluctant, petulant and full of hate princeling holding the fate of the world. There is a little too much traveling, scouting, sleeping but it is offset by epic battles. The shape shifting could have been used more imaginatively in fighting the assassins.
This is the first and best book of a trilogy. I thought that the others were also good, just not as good as this. I have read the entire trilogy 3 times; it is one of my go-to books. I am not necessarily a fantasy buff, I just like good books that keep my interest. I am easily bored and there are lots of books that I never finish, so the fact that I've read this set more than once is a strong recommendation.
A long-buried curse emerges and threatens the continent; nice people with magical abilities are shunned and despised; a princess suffers in an unhappy political marriage Nothing entirely new, but these plots are skillfully developed. The characters are portrayed as complex, recognizing their own limitations as well as their strengths, and the plot is well-paced. Gee explores shape-shifting in intriguing ways (to write more would give away too much) and she has a firm grasp of political maneuvers in the world she's created. I'm looking forward to continuing with this series.
It was obvious about half-way through that this book wasn't going to resolve all the plot lines. Normally, I really dislike this, seeing it as purely a marketing scheme. But this book was different. Although I knew I'd only have half (actually a third) of the story by the end, it was crafted well enough that there was a sufficient sense of closure at the end; it didn't leave me frustrated, merely eager to get the next in the series.

On top of that, this is a 'realistic' swords and sorcery fantasy. Not just swashbuckling muscle men and seductive witches, but a complex back story, social issues and political intrigues. The inclusion of a minor plot line aded depth and gave variety to the pace (and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of young Jaume in volume three!).

Well written, many scenes evoke multiple senses to give a sense of place. The main characters are well developed and complex. The secondary characters are not as clearly defined and sometimes I found myself a little confused over who was what (especially as they shape-shifted) which meant that when someone died (hardly a spoiler - someone always dies in swords-and-sorcery!), I was emotionally uninvolved as I hadn't identified with them. Still, this is a minor fault in an otherwise absorbing fantasy - not a genre I read a lot of.
This is what I think of as an old school fantasy the bad guys are bad but not complex, the good guys are good just misunderstood, the Prince is a little bit snotty and the stoic Princess is sold off into a marriage she didn’t want. There is a curse has been awakened in the land and it is slowly spreading. It rips the humanity away from men and women who drink the tainted water until they kill everything and everyone they love.

This is a cookie cutter fantasy that really relies on a lot of tropes that I would expect more in a historical fiction novel than a new fantasy realm. Honestly if you took out the fire burning/shapeshifting/healing mages and curse it is just the run of the mill historical fiction novel.

But that said I flew through the book. While I didn’t find the writing really original it is very well done, the story moved along quickly and the pages just flew by easily. Much if it was fairly predictable and I believe it could have clipped out maybe 100 pages or so of unneeded repetition, but since the chapters are so short and clip between three different people and their situations it isn’t really noticeable.

Most of the book is spent on the run with Prince Harkeld after he finds out that he is the only person who can stop a curse that is spreading across the land. The king wants to use Harkeld to gain power and force other kingdoms into submission, but Harkeld wants to stop the curse as soon as possible so that the people do not suffer.

I want to like Harkeld because he is the hero and he just left his entire life behind to save people but I struggled with him. He has so many prejudices against the mages he is traveling with. So much so that the only solution is for four of the mages guarding him to take turns shapeshifting to look like a normal armsman from the isles in order to guard Harkeld. The shapeshifter that is tasked with this the most is Innis a very talented mage in her own right and as predicted she starts to have conflicting feelings for the prince even when wearing the guise of a man. It’s been done and been done better but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it still.

Most of the Harkeld storyline is spent running from the king and traveling to the first stone that needs to be destroyed. Harkeld is also trying so hard to deny the mage blood in him. His prejudices run so deep that he starts to hate himself and the potential that he may have to be a mage. He calls them witches and repeats absolutely ridiculous stories that he has heard about the mages. It took entirely too long for some of those to dissipate but I have some hope that will be better in the next book.

The other two story lines are much smaller. Princess Britta is forced into an arranged marriage with a horrible man. As she deals with the truth of her predicament and the horrible atrocities her father is willing to commit she finds a way to contribute. I liked Princess Britta, she was kind and while she made some decisions that I maybe didn’t agree with in the story to deal with her situation they were understandable. The other characters in her story Karel and Yasma also fall into a precarious position with the Princess, but I loved their dedication to her because of the type of person she was not what her title is.

Jaume’s is the final PoV and he didn’t get much time at all in this installment but I think he will play a much larger role in the next. He is a child from an area hit by the curse. Escaping only barely with his life, he is traveling the land trying to stay ahead of the curse. His tale is one of the mood of the common person of the land and how they are coping.

The ending I found extremely predictable. I was sure how it was going to go down at about the middle part of the book. But I was still entertained and grew too really like a few of the characters, Innis the talented mage being my favorite. She has a lot of potential and I enjoy the budding something that is between her and Harkeld.

Had I read this in 2011 when it first came out I might have liked it more, but with so many other fantasies out there that really push the good/evil balance of their characters I’m not as engaged by a book where people are just straight up good or evil with no inflections into their characters motivations.

I’ll wait to pass judgment on the series until after reading The Fire Prince, the next book in this series.