Review (sample): M. A. Price, The Caged Kingdom
I was really supposed to put out this review last week, so my apologies to M. A. Price. While I’m doing due diligence, let me also note that I’m supposed to highlight Gray Wolf, by J. W. Webb, as read aloud on Audible by Andrew McDermott. I don’t really listen to audiobooks much, so I agreed to post a notice without a review, which it turns out is all McDermott (and presumably Webb) especially wanted anyway. But I did read the sample of The Caged Kingdom by M. A. Price, and I’ll review that here.
The book description for Price’s work, at Amazon, goes like this:
A woman forged by fire. A girl the curse has chosen.
A Soldier with a secret. An ancient enemy.
A world on the brink of mayhem.
Welcome to Brodanna.
Only magic or your skill with a blade might save you.
Katanya Leshi is one of the most powerful Wielders left in the Kingdom of Brodanna.
She spent her life becoming a weapon, as deadly with her magic as she is with a blade.
After vowing never to return to Kara's Guild, only a debt to an old friend can bring her back and into the path of Mara Lars.
Mara only ever wanted to be a story teller, she never thought she’d wind up the centre in a story of her own. Freed from an oppressive King she finds herself thrust into a world of mystery and danger. The monsters of legend are real and she must stop them with powers she has no hope of controlling. Only one man might be able to help her...
Hidden in the royal palace, Captain Jaxon Rowdedge, hides a secret that could get him killed or worse...
The perfect soldier, Camrin Cassidy, thinks he has lost everything, but he is about to be surprised...
With Brodanna on the brink of war they must unite and take a stand or watch all they love burn...
The Caged Kingdom is the first instalment in an all new epic fantasy adventure by M A Price, perfect for fans ready to dive into a new world of swords and sorcery.
The sample begins, as so many epic fantasies do, with a series of events from a perspective that won’t be repeated. It’s a sort of inciting incident for the whole story. In this case, the Wielder (magician of some kind) Elex sneaks through the prison-cum-training-camp to murder someone, and it’s not quite clear at the end whether she succeeds or not (probably not), though she does do a lot of damage and get herself killed along the way. This then sets the ball rolling for the rest of the series. After the long opening, Price moves to a series of brief, rapid-fire chapters introducing us to what I presume will be the main characters, or anyway the main POVs in use.
The problem, for a reviewer anyway, is that this means the whole sample is quite obviously setup. Everything is meeting people for the first time, as briefly as possible, so that by the end of the sample, I don’t feel like I have a clue what to think about any of them. I got some impression of poor Elex, because that intro chapter was long, but she’s dead. The other thing is that there is so much world to set up, so much backstory to establish, that the whole sample is full of exposition.
The world itself seems a little unusual. In essence, there’s magic, but it’s hated and feared, and yet magicians (called Wielders) are essentially rounded up, imprisoned, enslaved, and made to use their powers to serve the King. On the face of it, that seems like a bad plan: if I’m the King, the last thing I want is a whole bunch of magicians, all of whom hate me, locked into a single place where they can talk to one another. Seems like a recipe for disaster, no? But there’s enough material in this sample to suggest that Price has thought of that one, and it’s a feature rather than a bug.
Stylistically, the prose moves along steadily, without very much one could comment on one way or another. I could pick nits, certainly, but I’m not sure that’s terribly helpful. It’s pretty obvious that the point of this series is going to be some oppressed characters, mostly female, fighting with the horror and angst of the dreadful things the King (or Prince, or whatever) and his henchmen do. The prose is there to make this possible.
I came away from this sample wondering what to say about it. It feels kind of unfair to review something when what you’ve read is composed in such a way as to suggest that it’s atypical, like reviewing a movie based on watching a trailer. On the other hand, it’s not a short sample, so I suspect that the heavy-exposition, long internal monologue, irregular dialogue or action style is not entirely unlike what happens in the rest of the book — which is intended as part 1 of a series, so there’s likely to be a great deal of this in the end.
As to whether you’d like this book, I think the description says what you need to know. If you read that and think, “Gosh, that’s right up my alley,” then it’s probably going to satisfy. If not, probably not.
If you read The Caged Kingdom, do tell me what you thought, and whether my comments were on-target at all. And those of you who like audiobooks, be sure to check out Gray Wolf!