Over a year ago now I signed up for a subscription to Illumicrate. Each month I get sent a box filled with beautiful hardback book in the fantasy / science fiction category normally with edge printing and specially done covers and end-pieces, often signed. In addition you get 4 or 5 ‘goodies’ that can be anything from a bookmark to a large fleece throw. Basically it’s a great deal and the only problem was my failure to get my act together and read the damn books. I’m trying to do better and make some dents in the list this year starting with Kate Dylan’s Until We Shatter.
The novel is a relatively ‘high fantasy’ epic set in a loosely sketched alternative world where there are ‘typics’ (people without magical abilities) and ‘shades’ (people with magical abilities aligned to a colour of the spectrum). Each shade has a different ability such as greens having a healing gift. When a shade and a typic have a child they can be a ‘hue’ possessing a variant ability, which we find out can have dangerous consequences depending on the colour. This has led to them being hunted and outlawed as religious extremism turns people against the magic.
Our heroine is a shade and operates as a thief with other shades in the one city left where magic is not outlawed. She and her friends become enmeshed in a plot that could result in the destruction of magic and the story is driven by what is essentially a magical heist where the protagonist doesn’t think she has the skills to pull it off and is pushed to do so by one of the apparent bad guys who has a very special ‘hue’ of magic (a gold shade who can take power from any other colour and use it).
There’s inevitable romance plots, backstabbing, apparent betrayals, and action-adventure. It maintains the Illumicrate principles in that the cast of the book are pretty diverse in terms of ability, colour, gender, and sexuality – the heroine is bisexual and shown in relationships with men and women, we have a prominent deaf character and use of sign language. These are all positive points in its favour and it was a fun page-turner of a book.
The negatives would be that the world feels under described – there’s no real description of the world or the magic system in there and whilst I picked it up as I went I’m sure that would be annoying for many readers. The heroine and her end love-interest are a conventional white male / white female pairing of two characters described in glowingly pretty terms – it’s a bit young adult in that sense. All the same, I found it engaging enough to buy a copy for a friend as a present so it was a good route back into reading a proper book and not 300k of Batman fan fiction!
The pictures attached show the book jacket, the lovely cover illustration and the frontispiece. I really do recommend Illumicrate to fans of the genre as their books are great collectibles
