Review: Angel Mage

Angel Mage by Garth Nix
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I'd just like to begin with ...

ARE YOU FKING KIDDING ME??

and then follow that up with ...

THANK GOD THIS TORTURE IS OVER.

Everything about this book made me so mad and I don't even know how to properly express my rage. Buckle up, kids, it's going to be a bumpy rant.

Firstly, are we all aware by now that my favourite book of all time is The Three Musketeers? That's vital information. Here's an excerpt from my review of The Vicomte de Bragelonne to give you an idea of my obsession:

The Musketeers are officially my bros, and when I read about them I imagine them as friends, which means I feel their experiences that much more significantly. I laugh out loud, I grin, I gasp, I tear up, I bite my lip and I'm pretty sure if I had a moustache I would twist it. This series gives me a very serious case of feelings.

Naturally, this Musketeer obsession leads me to read anything I get my hands on that's even closely related, and this book here is even dedicated to Dumas and the '73 and '74 films inspired by The Three Musketeers (TTM).

So here's the set up: Set in a world that slightly mirrors historic France, angels are controlled by people and basically used as slaves. Lilliath is a psychopath who did something bad, went to sleep for 137 years or so and now she's awake to finish what she started. Somehow her goal is tied to the fates of four random individuals: Henri, Simeon, Agnez and Dorotea, and there is a high chance I'm spelling all of these names wrong because they're stupid variations of normal names and I'm too damn lazy to check the spelling.

Things I hated:
-The names
-The over-attempt to make this a feminist novel
-Angels being no more than slaves
-Extensive world-building that was mostly confusing
-The story was kind of bland and also confusing
-Random awkward sexual tension
-Issues like racism barely addressed
-THIS DID NOT EVEN COME CLOSE TO THE THREE MUSKETEERS. All it did was steal a handful of characters, make them female, and then completely corrupt their essence.

Here's an example:

Rochefort. In TTM, he is d'Artagnan's nemesis. They get into it, and they're both skilled fighters, but Rochefort is totally ruthless and cunning and spends the novel doing the Cardinal's dirty work. He's a very clear villain.
In this novel, the female Rochefort is the general of the female Cardinal and definitely does her dirty work, but she spends most of this novel being 'poor misunderstood me' and mooning over Dorotea. We are told she's a skilled fighter but this book is more interested in her trying to get into Dorotea's pants.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Characters/Names
Firstly, the original names are ridiculous. They just didn't suit and I got them pretty mixed up because they weren't really memorable for a while. I mean who even is Henri? What did he do? Why was he here? Then you've got all the characters lifted from TTM. They're ALL female, now, too. The Cardinal, Rochefort, d'Artagnan. Milady. I think our four friends are somehow supposed to represent the original four musketeers but there are no similarities AT ALL, other than Agnez being a hothead. The angels all blend together and they are in and out of the story so fast they're not worth caring about anyway. Then the place names just made me cringe. Dumas's d'Artagnan was a Gascon; these 'musketeers' are 'Bascons' (so creative). It was such a bastard mix of 'inspired by' TTM and blatantly stolen. Everything that made me love the characters of TTM was completely absent here.

Feminism etc
Look I am all for feminism but this novel was trying way too hard. And not just with feminism. There's a scene where they all get naked together because no one cares about nudity, and the book has more emphasis on same sex couples than hetero. We got told what colour skin everyone has (and it's normally a shade of brown) and all of the best warriors and most powerful characters are women. Representation is great and all, but this just feels cheap. It's like it's going out of it's way to tell you how accepting and open-minded it is, but there's way too much emphasis on it for it to seem normal. I love badass female characters, but there was just no logic to it. It took equality and ran the other way with it, so that the men in this story are soft characters being manipulated by women. Meanwhile there's the 'refusers' who are this book's version of slaves, and it doesn't discuss this issue nearly enough. Points for trying, buddy, but delivery of the themes in this novel would be a D minus.

The Angels
Speaking of barely-addressed slavery, the angels in this book are RUBBISH. There are different tiers of power (thank god for the guide at the front because when they started talking about Thrones I was totally confused) but even the all-powerful archangels are slaves to humans? There are also so many of them that it was pointless keeping track of them all. They might as well have been little fairies or sprites or something. Because they are WEAK. This was such an incredibly disappointing aspect of the story.

World Building vs Story
The problem is, he spent so much time building the world that there just wasn't enough time for a decent story. It was thin and pathetic and really confusing, and there was no real drive to the action. The connection between the four is tenuous and there doesn't seem to be a lot of point to anything. The world-building is extensive, but there is so much of it that it just gets tedious. Throw in that ending and this is basically a pointless, disappointing book.

Conclusion
Look, this is a book that tries so hard to be so many things that it ends up being a mess. It shares some similarities with The Three Musketeers, but it wants to be its own story, too, so it just ends up being a confusing mix of familiar things and completely unrelated magic. There's no real emotion to it anywhere, and the characters don't have any real redeeming qualities. While TTM was based heavily on friendship, loyalty and daring, these 'friends' are a newly formed group, they bicker, they're greedy and ill-mannered and generally don't have strong redeeming qualities to help up overlook this. The musketeers are more of a gratuitous mention than any kind of symbol, and Lilliath is more a sulky, emotional, psychopath teenager than the cunning, skilled assassin the original Milady was. There is so much effort put into making this a story that accepts everyone and everything that there's no real tension to it. There's no struggle. Zero emotional ties to anyone or anything.

I honestly don't know how people unfamiliar with The Three Musketeers are gonna view this one. Maybe you'll have a more enjoyable time because you won't have to witness some of your favourite characters being murdered by creative license. But this was agony for me.

Originally I gave it a generous two stars on finishing, because the beastlings (another creative name) were interesting, but I gotta take that back. My heart is hurting too much. This was an absolute abomination and a shame to the musketeer name. Just read the fking original, honestly.

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