Customer Reviews

The Mage in Black (Sabina Kane, Book 2)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Former assassin, Sabina Kane has decided to travel to New York to meet her long lost twin at the Hekate Council. And being a vampire/mage hybrid, she can begin a more thorough training of her magical abilities. But after a couple attempts on her life, it seems that someone within the haven of mages wants Sabina out of the way. Meanwhile, her demon familiar decides to join a fight club, where the last rule is `no mercy.'

Sabina is a strong, kick-butt female, who doesn't easily trust people after the betrayal of her grandmother. Her sister and demon familiar are more light-hearted and upbeat characters that have a great contrasting affect on Sabina. They bring out a different side of her. Sabina also grows in her magical abilities, and is put to the test in several ways. And along the way, we learn that she has a mysterious destiny involving the unity of all the dark races.

There is no sophomore slump here. This second Sabina Kane novel was even more fast-paced and action packed than the first. Once I started, I couldn't put it down, and read it in just a few short hours. Wells' fantastic world of a vast array of magical and mythical creatures focuses more on mages, werewolves and demons in this installment. With mystery, danger, suspense, magic, and a bit of romance, this urban fantasy series has it all. Last year, The Red-Headed Stepchild made my list of favorites, and having enjoyed The Mage in Black even more, I'm sure it will make this year's list as well.

I'm all for a good vamp novel, don't get me wrong, and I've been reading everything vamp/mage/demon I can get my hands on for the past few years now but this one doesn't stand out in a good way. The characters are flat, the writing is one-note, the story is predictable and the dialogue is cheesy. She sets a picture for everything that happens so that, as it's happening, you know what's coming next. She writes well enough that the book plays out like a movie in my head, which is something I really like (hence the bonus star she got from me) but the movie was just like every other gun toting, gas station exploding movie I've ever seen in theaters without the benefit of surround sound and popcorn.

Certain moments of in-opportune sexual distraction make the story feel immature and unrehearsed, like the writer wanted to be shocking by adding sexual undertones but lacks the real-life sexual experience to make it believable. There are also peppered moments of silliness meant to be comedy which happen at the oddest times and make you wonder if you're reading a parody. Should I laugh? It seemed so serious but maybe I should laugh now?

It's hard to understand her vision, or maybe her vision is just so common that it's overly simple and doesn't need to be understood.

Entire paragraphs start with "I", and the contradictions are endless.

In the first book, Adam gives that whole spiel about using magic carefully, lecturing about the butterfly effect. Yet the mages use their magic liberally, ranging from simple wardrobe changes to being too lazy to physically haul a practice dummy out of a closet. The mages are capable of teleportation, but Adam and Sabina waste time and risk lives on a road trip from California to New York. Couldn't he just teleport them and Sabina's precious Ducati? Why risk The Chosen One and their lives on a week-long cross-country journey? The dark races are careful about keeping their affairs secret from humans, yet three vamp assassins pull up on a gas station and start gunning down Adam and Sabina through the glass without any regard for security cameras or the gas station attendants. Sabina saves the attendant's life by shoving him to safety but she later realizes that they can't leave a human witness behind so she's ready to kill him. Why save him in the first place?

Sabina claims to be a good assassin yet attackers always catch her off-guard, she's always conveniently without a weapon when it's time to fight, and makes the dumbest decisions that would have most assassins killed. She asserts that she's not stupid, but she blurts out "You said they were supposed to throw the fight!" in the middle of a gambling arena. She's fleeing from a top secret organization that froze her bank accounts, but she doesn't withdraw emergency cash from her only working ATM card, and then goes broke after even that card is frozen.

The only 'strong' characteristic in her is her will to kill, but a strong compulsion to punch first and ask questions later =/= a strong woman.

I wish sentences started with something other than "I", and narrated more than "I did this" or "I felt that" and "I saw those" or "I blah blah". Or "He did that", "He did this" etcetera. Show, not tell.

Bottom line is, this is just another unimpressive vampire series. Not worth your money.

I'm pretty much a sucker for "pretty-but-tough" female supernatural plotlines. However, I really have trouble when the entire foundation of the character and story are repeatedly ignored or violated. It happened so often in this book that I quit, half way through.

The first book in the series had its flaws, but the characterizations were good and the plotline (barely) explained some of the lapses-of-character. In that book, our first meeting with the Vampire Assassin/Enforcer main-character is her cold-blooded shooting of a tough who won't take no for an answer. OK - she walks around armed to the teeth with specialized weapons that are particularly effective against supernaturals. Last time we see her use anything but a knife, of course - but the story did offer some rationale as to why that might be so.

In "The Mage in Black", Sabina Kane is deliberately going into exile from her former clan/family/employers, and into the bosom of a culture she has been brought up to distrust, fear, and even hate. What possible justification could there be for her to continue wandering around, hunted by old friends and new foes alike, with nothing more than a couple of knives? Professional assassin trained from toddlerhood my @$$! People are always getting the drop on her, and she is perennially unarmed. Possibly necessary for plot progression, but just too out-of-character to credit.

Bleah!

Review courtesy of [...].

THE MAGE IN BLACK picks up almost immediately after the events in Red Headed Step-child. Sabina and Adam (and Giguhl the demon/cat) are on their way to New York to embrace her paternal mage heritage after being betrayed by her maternal vampire side. Once there, she ruffles more then a few feathers including the local werewolf pack, a demon fight club, and the mage council itself.

The Kum-N-Go's roadside-chic interior was bathed in a sickly fluorescent glow. The aroma of stale smoke, urinal cakes, and rotgut coffee had me breathing through my mouth on the way back to the ATM. It was my turn to pay for gas, so getting cash took priority over raiding the snack aisle for the moment. -Opening of THE MAGE IN BLACK

The world building that I fell in love with in Red Headed Step-child is back portraying the Dark races (vamps, weres, mages, and the fae) as the children of Lilith and Cane. Keeping with biblical apocryphal, Vampires are vulnerable to the forbidden fruit (Sabina loads her gun with apple wood bullets). Very cool. And there are references to prophecies of Lilith's return which finger Sabina as the Chosen one.

In THE MAGE IN BLACK Mages and Vampires are, to quote Buffy, really unmixey things. Millennia of distrust and jealousy have brought them to the brink of war. As a half-blood, Sabina Kane is the embodiment of that animosity which makes her a hard character in every sense of the word. She's physically formidable, emotionally jaded, and self-destructive when it comes to personal relationships. Wrap that all up into one person and she can be hard to take. Without fail, you can expect her to be brash, sarcastic, and aggressive regardless of the situation. Sometimes I liked her behavior, other times I found her off-putting.

Overall, THE MAGE IN BLACK is a fun, gritty urban fantasy with a brutally tough heroine who never seems to catch a break. The tone never gets too dark with the addition of the mischief demon Giguhl. And there is an interesting romantic conflict for Sabina with the mage Adam and the vampire Slade. The ending is less of a conclusion, and more of a set up for the next Sabina Kane novel, Green-Eyed Demon which is due out March 2011. Despite some minor flaws, I'm looking forward to it.

Sexual Content: References to sex. A graphic sex scene.

I read Red Headed Stepchild and followed it up immediately with Mage in Black... partly because they were already on my bedside table but mostly because they *are* enjoyable.

I can't give this book anymore that three stars because much of the time I was rolling my eyes or gritting my teeth. Has anyone else noticed how much the word "ass" is used in this book? It appears like six times a page. C'mon, a fifty year old vampire can surely come up with some other line.

Sabina is always threating to "kick some a$$" or "show that b**ch a thing or two" and yet I never see all that much evidence of her actually doing so. LOTS of tough talk and cliched one liners without any real follow through. I agree with another reviewer, show don't tell. Sabrina needs to do more and mouth off less.

Another issue I had, was the fact that Adam was absent for over two hundred pages. I get that this is UF and therefore not romance but to conveniently tuck the hero away with the Faery queen for two thirds of the book is silly and contrived.

I really don't get Sabina. She's all about the gun toting assassin persona and then turns all whiney and immature. She sort of internally pays out everything and everyone and just annoyed me to tell the truth. Too self involved or something.

On the whole I would recommend this book to lovers of UF but yeah, maybe rent it from the library.

Okay this it the sequal where she is supposed to get a handle on her magic and what really happens is far from that. She does learn one use of her power and it does save her life. But it seems that even the vampires who are only drinking the mage blood can use magic better than her.

Good
1 The world continues to develop you get to see how the mages handle things and how they differ from the vampires. And for the most part it is a interesting.
2 The secondary characters are the best part of this and you get to be introduced to some new ones that are just as interesting
Bad
1 The main character gets beat up all over the place by people you would think a vampire assassin could take. I mean a werewolf who is not fully changed, a human, and an obese vampire pimp. Okay this is just crazy and breaks the mold for plot devices each time she loses a fight it furthers the plot in some way again at the cost that reader cease to believe her narrative.
2 Her emotions are all over the place usually this leads again to more plot devices she has to have these mood swings otherwise the plot would fall apart as she would of figured it out earlier.

Overall this was easily the weakest book of the series so far. The main character was unlikable and spent most of the time picking her ass off the ground. I really disliked this book if it was not for the fact that her dialog is so good I would of stopped reading. This book only makes you dislike the main character more as you start to feel she really is a screw up.

The mage in Black was the sequel to the red headed stepchild.
Sabina is unsure of who she is.
Not quite a vampire, not quite a mage. But something in between. She does not fit in anywhere. Her self esteem is low and she's used to fighting with her knives. But not everything in life can be done with knives. Her relationship with Giguhl, her demon minion, is quite endearing. The character makes real life mistakes: a fling with the wrong guy, running away from the right guy. In this book, you see her grow up and learn to care about others. It's the most human book about vampires and mages I've read in a long time. I loved the book and would recommend it to others.

This isn't really suitable as a stand alone book as it carries straight on from book one [Red-headed Stepchild] and people and events from that book are referenced throughout this book.


If you want to start reading the series then don't read this review, as it does contain spoilers from book one [I did try to write a review whilst dancing around the spoilers, but I ended up with two thousand words of complete gibberish].

So consider yourselves warned...




Sabrina, her demon familiar Giguhl and Adam and travel from Sabrina's [and The Dominae'] hometown of Los Angeles to the Hekate Council's base in New York so Sabrina and Maisie get to finally meet other. There's not just the family reunion on the cards however; The Council members are still determining whether to go to war with The Dominae or not, so they need to determine what type of power Sabrina has and train her accordingly.

As Sabrina starts to get used to being reunited with the sister she's only just learnt about and being in mage central, it becomes apparent at least one mage isn't and attempts begin being made on her life...


Sounds quiet compared to the last book, doesn't it? Don't fret, Sabrina and Giguhl also come across a demon version of Fight Club and Sabrina also accidentally gets into trouble with a local werewolf pack. Oh yeah - she also runs into an ex.



Book one was built around the threat to the vampires major religion and the mistrust between the supernatural races, but if you are looking for more of the same you'll be disappointed as the events in THE MAGE IN BLACK are powered by Sabrina's need for some good old vengeance: Sabrina now knows that the friend Lavinia ordered her to kill didn't betray the Dominae at all and Lavinia has lied to Sabrina and treated her like a second-class citizen her whole life.

Sabrina realises that it's safer and simpler to kill her way through the corrupted Dominae in order to kill her grandmother, rather then try to talk to members and attempt to get them to see reason. So this volume opens as she just goes along with the only person she has left in the world [Adam] and prepares to meet up with the sister she has only just found out about...

The main obstacle that Sabrina faces here is the whole vampire versus mage situation. Sabrina's vampiric side and ethics are stronger and feel 'right' to her as she has been raised in a vampire cult, so she is naturally at odds by the mage community she is now in the middle off. For the first fifty three years of her life she has been told that her mage blood is an abombination, now - although no-one outright says it to her face - she is made to feel that her vampiric blood is 'bad'. Basically -in her mind at least - she's just traded in the devil she knows for the one that she doesn't.


Some readers may be put off by Sabrina's often petty attitude in this book, but I find that it adds a sense of realism to things. Think about it, she has just literally lost everything; Her friends, her home, job and the only family she has known for fifty three years want her to suffer and die. Then she is abruptly put in the environment of the twin sister she has only just found out about who is in the highly respected position of leader of the Hekate council, Maisie is loved by everyone, has never been treated as inferior because of her mixed blood, and is generally well-adjusted person, so of course Sabrina is going to act somewhat put-out, lost, envious and abandoned.

I like that Sabrina is still part-vampire and that the author hasn't flip-flopped and made her whiter than white and all lovely-dovey with everyone now that she has reunited with her sister; She feels nothing for her long-dead parents, is willing to try and bond with Maisie but is still cautious and closed with her and she is agreeable and tries to get along with the other mages more out of a mix of obligation and a desire to piss off granny. At this point I'd say the only people she'd class as friends are Giguhl [Sabrina calls him her sidekick, not her familiar and certainly not minion] and Adam.

As for ethics; Sabrina still kills when she needs to, she pulls a face at being asked not to hunt humans for food, she thinks the mage's "protect the innocent" speech is new-age BS and humans? They're just annoying bugs; When one witnesses an incident and will be able to identify her and Adam, she is unable to see why killing him is considered horrifying to Adam.

Speaking of Adam, yep - there's a romantic sub-plot bubbling away there. Sabrina has developed feelings for Adam and it's clear that he returns the interest, but the whole mage and vampire aspect means that she is trying to ignore romantic leanings. It is easy to see why she has fallen for him so quickly; He is one of the few supernatural's who hasn't been horrified or taunted her, he has seen her at her worst and still defended her, he's fought by her side and has always been honest with her.

Jaye Wells proved in book one that she has qualms about killing of characters, so there's never that feeling of assurance when it comes to characters in peril - everyone is fair game in the books, so there is loads of tension building, that kept me reading "just one more chapter" before bed [it was almost two a.m. before I managed to put the book down].


However I'm left with some niggling questions. Can all vampires reproduce or only powerful ones? Can they reproduce with anyone or only powerful individuals or those from certain races? So if they can reproduce there must be an aging process for the vampires, so how does that work? Or does it stop at a certain point?

The issue I have is that the author may have indeed answered these questions at some point in the books, but there is so much world-building and new character revelations - seemingly in every chapter - that I haven't taken any answers that there may have been in, despite re-reading the books and keeping them both on hand for this review.

This series is read by Cynthia Holloway, who has a very feminine, young-sounding voice with a teenage cadence to it. Cynthia Holloway also narrated the Karen Chance's Cassandra Palmer series and Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires series. She has a light sound to her voice that adds to my perception that this book would appeal to the young adult listener. Personally, I was much more impressed with her reading in the Morganville Vampires series. Her voice as Claire, Eve, Myrnin, and even the vampires, was spot-on. For some reason, the voices in this novel seemed too similar at times, even between male and female voices.

Is it wrong to recommend a novel with so much sex and violence to young adults? I hope not, because I highly recommend this one to the late high school, early college listener. This is one audiobook I would have absolutely loved at 18. Why? It's fast. The pace is not even a gallop, it's a full throttle. You just hold on and go for the ride. Sabina arrives in New York, someone tries to kill her. She goes to the park, someone shoots her, and then she gets attacked by wolves. She goes to a nightclub, meets an old flame, and punches him in the face. There are ebbs in tension, but the flow changes every ten to fifteen minutes, which is too fast to become bored with any one scenario.

Another reason why I would recommend this novel to the younger audience of the urban fantasy/paranormal reader is the tone of the book. Sabina Kane and her twin are 53 years old, but they are consistently referred to as "child," "girl," "brat," and other terms that make them sound like they are 16. And Sabina lives up to it. She is brimming with good old-fashioned teenage angst and related abandonment/acceptance issues. Her internal dialogue is pretty advanced, but everything in quotations comes right out of high school.

This is a big improvement on the first novel in the series stylistically. Jaye Wells keeps the wonderfully quirky and hilarious characters, like Giguhl, the demon (who can change form into a hairless cat and gets shot in the ass among other similarly embarrassing injuries), and keeps the deliciously twisty and turny unexpected plot revelations. And best of all, she ditches most of the unnecessarily elaborate and passive internal dialogue that was present in Red-headed Stepchild. It still shows up from time to time in Mage in Black, but must less so.

I did not enjoy the cliff-hanger ending. Cliff-hangers are not that uncommon in this genre. They are found at the end of the first books in the above-mentioned Morganville Vampires series, and also in Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning. However, in those books, the cliffhanger was for a secondary plot development with the primary plot for the book being completely resolved. I suppose Mage in Black is similar because we find out who was trying to kill Sabina toward the end of the book. However, the cliffhanger has to do with the war between the dark races, and it seems that this was something the book was building up toward from the beginning of Sabina's arrival in New York. I would have liked to have seen it through to the end. Luckily, Green-Eyed Demon was released yesterday.