Spell Starter

Aza Wu never thought getting her magic back through a gathered spell would be like this: pain and revolt in her body every time she tries to use the foreign magic forced upon her by Saint Willow, the gang leader she is now indebted to. Saint Willow makes Aza use her new rebellious magic as an enforcer and threatens Aza’s family whenever she doesn’t do exactly as she is told. Aza’s new life after the Guild of Now’s Tournament isn’t at all what she hoped for, and it gets even worse when Saint Willow orders Aza to take part in a new tournament that the gang leader is hosting with a group she calls the Founders. Saint Willow promises that this new tournament, taking place nightly and all year round, will put the Guild’s annual tournament to shame, and she doesn’t care at all about the impact this will have on Aza or Lotusland itself.

Without a choice in the matter, Aza is forced into a new kind a trauma, fighting for her life every night using magic that rejects her each time she tries to wield it. However, Aza gets a glimpse of hope when Saint Willow’s magic gatherer, Nima, asks to meet in secret and offers to help Aza not only get her original magic back, but also to get out from under Saint Willow’s thumb for good. All Aza must do is keep Saint Willow distracted with her performance in the tournament for two more days while Nima finishes gathering Aza’s magic. This is harder for Aza though when she sees Finch, the man she defeated and stripped of his magic at the last tournament, indebting her to Saint Willow. She is intimately familiar with Finch’s ruthlessness as he murdered her sister Shire in a previous tournament, and she knows that his appearance at the new fights cannot be good. Aza reaches out to Oliver, Finch’s brother, to find out more information and finds herself fighting an attraction to him.

Aza’s time is running out as she tries to get her life back and save her parents’ tea house with Nima’s help. She must try to figure out what happened to Cormac (the Scout investigating Shire’s death), keep Saint Willow’s eyes on her while Nima gather’s her magic, and find out what sort of revenge Finch is planning to exact upon her while wrestling with the consequences of her actions in the last tournament. Meanwhile, Lotusland is falling apart from the constant full magic being cast in the Founder’s fighting rings, and no one seems to care about this except Aza and Embry, a member of the Guild of Now, who is trying to end the new competition. Juggling all these things while being tortured by the strange magic in her veins whenever she casts isn’t easy, and Aza can feel herself being stretched thinner and thinner as the days go on. The question is – can she manage to escape Saint Willow and Founders tournament before her time runs out?

Spell Starter is the rapid-fire sequel to Caster, (www.cmreviews.ca/node/1050)
once again featuring the deteriorating Lotusland as the setting, but, in this novel, the stakes are raised. More magic is being cast causing more destruction to the earth and with even less care from the Founders than the previous tournaments’ organizers. Aza witnesses first-hand how the world breaks around her after some of the fights, and Chapman’s writing of these scenes is excellent. Readers can feel Aza’s palpable struggle and her powerlessness in the face of Saint Willow’s threats to her family as well as in the face of her new magic that rejects her at every turn. While Aza feels very powerless in the novel, it is said by Embry that she still has choices even when it seems like she doesn’t, and Aza must directly confront the cost of these choices. This comes through as one of the novel’s major themes, and it is explored through Aza’s moments of introspection throughout the story, moments that are expertly written by Chapman. The writing is poignant and pulls readers into Aza’s head which is quite a captivating place to be.

While Caster’s main focus was on Aza and her parents’ trauma after Shire’s death, Spell Starter concerns itself more with Aza’s relationship to her magic and the world around her. The focus on how the magic affects Lotusland and how little Saint Willow and the Founders care about the repercussions of their actions creates a very interesting contrast that threads through the entire novel and expands upon the explorations from Caster. Aza grapples with how her actions in the fighting rings directly affect the earth, and she must consider in a larger way the lack of balance in power between her and her magic. This is another aspect that was explored in Caster but is exacerbated in this story through the magic that hurts and rejects Aza constantly. She must constantly consider how using her magic will affect her, which accentuates how she sees the way it affects her world.

Much like its predecessor, Spell Starter is a lightning paced novel that takes off right at the beginning and doesn’t stop until Aza’s adventures are over. However, the pacing of the novel results in some of the other aspects being sadly underdeveloped. Some of the highlights from the last novel are missing from Spell Starter, such as Aza’s relationship with her parents. She is so busy fighting to protect them that her interactions with them are extremely pared down compared to Caster. In addition, Chapman has so many plot threads interweaving to create the novel that it feels rushed when read. Things come together and move apart so quickly that there is little time for readers to take a moment and relate to Aza, a core strength from the last novel. Many of the relationships and moments of reflection that Aza has are brief, and, while we can read a lot into them with knowledge from Caster, the novel could sorely use a moment of respite for Aza and the readers to sit with the themes. One of the most rushed aspects is the climax of the novel, something that feels both epic and underwhelming all at once, suffering from the underdeveloped characters and themes. There are many things we can pull out of a reading of Spell Starter, but it would be a much more satisfying read if it could linger just a little more on its highlights.

Although Spell Starter has its flaws, it is still a thoroughly exciting read and follow-up to Caster. The novel continues to pull on threads from its predecessor, and its themes are interesting and thought-provoking. These aspects, combined with Chapman’s prose, make the novel well worth the read, and Chapman’s storytelling and characters are just as engaging to be with as they were before. Readers will want to get their hands on this book for its compelling conclusion to Aza’s story.