Cold Magic by Kate Elliott

There are a lot of disappointing books to be found on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves these days.  I know, because I read faster than my favorite authors can write, so I’ve had the chance to find a lot of them.  But this review isn’t about a disappointing book.  This review is about a book by one of those few authors whose work I buy, fearlessly, as soon as it comes out, even if I know nothing about the story inside. 

If I know it’s by Kate Elliott, I know I need to read it.

Her latest book is called Cold Magic, and you need to read it, too.

It’s a very hard book to write a review about, because there’s almost nothing I can say about the plot that won’t be a spoiler.  Our beloved protagonist (and you will love her, I promise) spends most of the novel just trying to figure out what is happening to her and why; if I revealed any of it, you’d hate me.*

Our main protagonist is Catherine (Cat), an orphan who lives with her Aunt, Uncle, and, most importantly, her cousin-who-might-as-well-be-a-sister, Beatrice (Bee).  Their family is an ancient one, a clan of mercenary spies steeped in secrets, some of which even Cat and Bee can’t know… Some of which especially Cat and Bee can’t know.

Elliott describes this as an “…Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy with Bonus! airship, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendants of troodons.”  ...And that’s not all!

The pacing is breathless.  The banter will make you laugh out loud, even if you’re reading in public (which is the true test of these things).  The characters will follow your around for days after you’ve finished the book, making you smile at the things you remember them saying and the things they might say if faced with your daily tribulations, they’re that three-dimensional.  And clever.  Did I mention that they’ll make you laugh?

The story takes place in an ice-covered alternate Earth with a history that is at once similar to ours and very, very different.  The world-building is handled marvelously.  It feels real and well thought-out, though this is handled subtly; Elliott doesn’t try to prove she’s thought of everything by bludgeoning her readers with irrelevancies.  Instead, she deftly weaves in enough backstory while exploring her characters’ motivations to hint at vast reserves of history, geography, politics and cultural anthropology (and troodonopology?) waiting to be employed in service to the story.

As I said earlier, it’s hard to write a non-spoilerific review of this book, and I assure you for all my apparent cheerleading I’m still not doing it justice.  If you are a fantasy or steampunk reader, you should buy this book.  Today.   You’ll love it. 

*But you’d probably get over it, since the book holds up very well on re-reading.

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NB: If you’re not a regular reader of speculative fiction (i.e. science fiction & fantasy), you should understand that the best writers of this genre will not start the book with a brain dump of everything that’s different about the world in which the story takes place, because this is emphatically not how the characters in the book will see it.  Instead, writers like Kate Elliott (who certainly qualifies as one of the best writers in the genre) will allow you to explore the world of the story through the eyes of the characters who actually live there. 

That means you’ll be piecing together your understanding of the world as you read, which is one of the best experiences in literature as long as A) the author can be trusted to reveal what you need to know when you need to know it, and B) you give the author the trust s/he deserves.   I can promise that if you do your part, Kate Elliott has held up her end of the bargain.  If you read with that in mind, this book would make a good introduction to the fantasy genre.