[Book review] Magic at the Gate by Devon Monk

Click image to purchase from Amazon

I’ve noticed that, over the past few years, I’ve begun reading a significant amount of paranormal fantasy.  Lots of magic, lots of action, usually a dollop (or more than a dollop) of romance.  And of course, as with any large sub-genre, you get good examples and bad examples.  Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom novels are, I’m happy to say, among the better ones out there.

Magic at the Gate picks up mere seconds after the end of the previous book: Allie has walked voluntarily into the realm of death to find the soul of her lover, Zayvion Jones.  Helping her is her father, whose soul has been taking up residence in her head for a good little while.  While they do find Zayvion and retrieve his soul, it costs Allie something extremely precious—the small magic that she’s always carried within her.

Bereft of her own unique magic, Allie returns to a world where magic is under siege.  The disks created by her father, used to store magical power temporarily, have been stolen by Jingo Jingo, a former member of the magical Authority.  And the disks are showing up wedded to ghosts that are distressingly solid… and angry. 

So few magic users remain to guard the remaining disks and the magical wells that it’s uncertain whether they can be protected at all.  And when it seems like someone has found a way to recharge the disks instead of them burning out after one use, Allie and the others may finally be outclassed in the magic department.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the paranormal fantasy genre recently, and it happens in ongoing series: the male lead is taken out of the picture for a significant amount of the book.  I’ve seen two or three other examples lately.  One the one hand, this lets the author portray their main character as just themselves, without having to bounce their personality off of another character constantly.  On the other hand, it does disrupt the rhythm of the series up to that point.  In Magic at the Gate, not only does Monk leave Zayvion comatose for nearly the entire book, but she has Allie go through this weird flirtation/attraction/something with Shame, a death magic practitioner.  It lasts for about half of the story, and then inexplicably vanishes.  It doesn’t go away at the same time that Zayvion wakes up, so I’m not sure what happened there.

Something else that I missed was Allie’s memory loss.  In previous installments, using magic deprives her of memories; as a result, she carries around a notebook and records everything that happens to her, in case a spell robs her of those events.  But in this book, even though she’s still recording things, she never loses memories—and in fact, she regains one or two from her childhood.  The memory loss was one of the more fascinating aspects of the series, and I wish it had continued.

However, the novel does still have its high points.  It expands on the use of the magically charged disks that Allie’s father invented.  The whole set-up of having ways to actually channel magic into regular pipelines is a great device in Monk’s world, melding magic and science in a unique way.  With the disks now possibly being rechargeable instead of one-use-only lends an interesting set of “what-if” scenarios to future novels.

I was also glad to see the author expand on the reasons behind the often-hinted-at split in magic.  In this world, magic was deliberately fractured into Light and Dark, but there was never an explanation as to why.  Readers will find out why early in the story.  The one kink in this revelation is that it’s a bit of a set-up, as one of the feature players in that little tale shows up at the novel’s conclusion.  It would have been nice to have had that background already in play a novel or two earlier; that way, it wouldn’t have sounded like it was included solely to give some context to the book’s climax.  The actual reveal of the details behind magic’s splintering makes for a great side-story, and one I hope that Monk explores in more depth later.

As always, the Allie Beckstrom novels contain plenty of action, and solid plot, and a story that moves forward smartly with every book.  Nobody’s sitting on their laurels in these stories!  Fans of magic and mayhem with a little spice thrown in for good measure will love Magic at the Gate and everything that came before it too.

Read an excerpt

This book was provided by the publisher.