This was interesting but not super compelling. I will probably finish the series?
Another one from the TBR Jar. And this one really kicked me in the butt, because I’ve actually owned an ARC of this book since six months before it was originally published in September 2009. And I’ve had it in my small little pile of books that basically says to me every time I look at it, “Okay, really you need to read this.” And so I never look at that pile.
Anyway, this is a book about a world where all magic comes from grapes that have been turned into spellwine. The author wrote it after her editor challenged her to write a magic system based on either food or wine. So she did. And it turned out pretty well!
The book opens with a worldbuilding prologue, telling all about how vineyards and spellwine used to be controlled by princes, and things were basically terrible, until the son of two gods came to earth and shattered that power, weakening and making more complicated the power of the grapes, so that no person would be able to have both political power and still control the magic of the grapes. There’s also a cruel but efficient clause in the magic that makes it so that only people who come from the lowliest of backgrounds develop the magic necessary to become a vineart. This actually encourages the practice of slavery, which is disgusting, so that vinearts will be able to basically create their own apprentices by buying a bunch of slaves and keeping an eye one them. Oh, and also they have to emotionally neglect them (!). Anyway, that’s all just background and something I focused on while reading, and it’s not really parsed out in the text yet, so that’s one reason I’m interested in reading the sequels, because I want to see if it’s addressed (doesn’t seem like the dude who took away power from people who were misusing it would be super happy the system he created was being used to oppress people).
Our main character is Jerzy, a slave. His master notices his talents and takes him away from working in the vineyard to live in the main house and train him up as an apprentice. It’s then that we learn the master isn’t actually as cruel as he appears, and does care for his slaves, but as discussed above, treats them with disinterest so that their lowliness might encourage magic to pop up. And so it did in Jerzy. The first third of the book is almost entirely devoted to his training, and to him learning to be a person instead of a slave. It was a bit heartbreaking in places, even though I was at an emotional remove for most of the book. That emotional remove was kind of a weird experience, and the main reason I’m only giving this three stars (3.5, really). But then the main conflict crops ups. Someone is misusing magic and attacking other vinearts, and the whole system could be in danger.
I appreciated this book more on an intellectual level than a visceral one, but explaining the magic system itself took up time, and the book was pretty short, so my feelings for the characters and the world might very well deepen if I read future books. Looks like the series hasn’t caught on at all in the ten years I’ve had this ARC, though. This book only has about 1,000 or so ratings on Goodreads, and it’s sequels have much less. My library doesn’t even have book three. Maybe I’ll track it down later this year.
[3.5 stars]