#Review - The Gossamer Mage by Julie E. Czerneda #Fantasy

Series: Standalone?
Format: E-Galley, 416 pages
Release Date: August 6, 2019
Publisher: DAW
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Epic

From an Aurora Award-winning author comes a new fantasy epic in which one mage must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic

Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm, are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.

Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer, a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.

For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.

To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.

Story Locale: Fantasy world

The Gossamer Mage, by author Julie E. Czerneda, is a story that takes place in a fantasy land called Tananen. The world’s only remaining magic is in Tananen, where only women can speak the Deathless Goddess language, and only men can write her spells – both at a terrible cost. But now something dangerous and dark has come into Tiler’s Hold, destroying magic creations, and silencing the Goddess.  Meanwhile, there is a mage on a mission to destroy said Goddess not knowing that with her death, an even larger threat may rise.

The two primary characters in this book are Maleonarial, a so called mad mage who has been away from civilization for 12 years. Sick of the premature aging aspect of magic, the mage scribe decides that he is going to find the Deathless Goddess and end her. But, the Deathless Goddess isn’t the only being on the scene. Kait (Kaitealyon) Alder is one of the Daughters of the Goddess who can no longer hear the Goddess, but she can hear an evil that is seeping into every crack in Tiler's Hold and elsewhere. Since women can understand the Goddess and men have the ability to write her words but not understand them, they must team up in order to figure out what exactly is happening and stop it.

Fairness in reviewing, this book to a lot of stamina for me not to toss it aside, and to move on to something better. But, since I am unstable when it comes to finishing books even if I have to jump over several dozen pages at once, I persevered.  Julie Czerneda is a new to me author therefore I had not expectations of what to expect while reading her story. The ending to me was an abstract failing. There was no real indication that the story was wrapped up, or what really happened to the characters were are supposed to care about. There’s a lot of shifting narratives in this book, which has around 6 chapter total, which makes it more difficult to keep track of the characters and the plot.

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