Author: Stuart Jaffe
Title: The Way of the Black Beast
ISBN: 9781466321847
Publisher: Stuart Jaffe (September
2011)
Disclaimer: Received for review
purposes
| 
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Malja wants answers. She wants to know why the two most powerful magicians in all of Corlin ripped her from her mother's arms, raised her only to fight, and then tossed her away to die at age ten. She wants to know why they are trying to recreate the spells which caused the Devastation that wiped out most of the world's population, leaving behind skeletal cities and abandoned technology. And she wants to kill them.
With Tommy, an orphan bearing the tattoos of a sorcerer, she crosses this shattered land. Despite the challenges they face -- crazed magicians, guitar-playing assassins, mutated beasts -- Malja pursues her vengeance with a single-mindedness that may destroy all she holds dear, forcing her to make a terrible choice between the family she lost and the one she has built.” GoodReads’ blurb
I’m not sure what I was expecting to
find when I began reading The Way of the Black Beast. I suppose, in a way, I
was ready to discover an entertaining, somewhat typical story with your
classical fantasy world and larger-than-life heroine.
When was the last time I was this
wrong again?
The novel starts off with action and
doesn’t really let up, but it’s not a sink-or-swim situation. You get to
understand the world, or whatever’s left of it, and did I love the
worldbuilding. It actually is a post-apocalyptic world where magic (and mages)
were used to further provide comfort and what passes as tech, until the wrong
people got too power-hungry and everything went to hell. That’s where we step
in, following the heroine as she tries to right the wrongs done to her in a way
that sometimes causes her more grief that sated revenge.
That’s the other thing I liked: with
the succinct introduction form the blurb, I half-feared to find another
character too powerful to be balanced, too archetypical to be relatable. Malja
is a legend in her own power, and her battle abilities are to be reckoned with,
but she still was deeper than that. She told herself her goal was just revenge,
but in truth she went out of her way to help the kid, to try to protect him
from what he was. She solved her problems with her custom weapon and left no
room for argument, but the ghost from her past chase her and she does wonder if
it’s worth it. Unlike your average angsty lead, though, she’s not all
woe-is-me, why must I kill... it’s more like it’s the only way she knows to
deal with things, to cope with the rage inside her, and she acts without
remorse even though she wonders if things could be different.
The one thing
didn’t like so much were the “bad guys”. Not that smart, not that
motivated beyond a generic lust for power... They weren’t on par with the rest
of the story. All in all though, a great book. I’ll be sure to be on the look
out for future instalments (hopefully we’ll get the world even more detailed
and developed!) or new novels coming from
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