Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, LGBTQ+
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay, Gender Fluid
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Adrien Desfourneaux, professor of magic and disgraced ex-physician, has discovered a conspiracy. Someone is inflicting magical comas on the inhabitants of the massive city of Astrum, and no one knows how or why.
Caught between a faction of scheming magical academics and an explosive schism in the ranks of the Astrum’s power-hungry military, Adrien is swallowed by the growing chaos. Alongside Gennady, an unruly, damaged young soldier, and Malise, a brilliant healer and Adrien’s best friend, Adrien searches for a way to stop the spreading curse before the city implodes.
He must survive his own bipolar disorder, his self-destructive tendencies, and his entanglement with the man who doesn’t love him back.
The Review
“My name is Adrien Desfourneaux. Please pay attention.”
With these short sentences, the narrator in Madeleine Nakamura’s mesmerizing novel, “Cursebreakers,” sets out to relate the events of 3016. Clearly, this is not a world with which we are familiar, although there is much about it that will resonate with readers in this time in this world.
Adrien is an academic in a school referred to as the Pharmakeia. He was a doctor, a magical healer, with the Chirurgeonate; but a very public disaster ended his career and put him on trial as a witch. You see, this is a world in which many people have magical powers. To use your magic you need to be licensed, and to harm another person is to become a witch, which is a capital offense. Adrien was cleared of the charges, but the damage was done. Now he teaches.
Adrien is also bipolar and a drug addict. In his world the term is akratic. It is an acknowledged mental illness and can be managed with magic by qualified healers. The drugs, called nepenthe, are just what you might expect someone with mental health issues to turn to in their darkest moments. Nakamura has skillfully created a glossary of words that suggest an alien culture that is cleverly drawn from real cultures that feel vaguely familiar. Her characters are all human and familiarly so; but they inhabit a world that is as far from Hogwarts as one could imagine. Nakamura’s world makes me think of the Osiris and Beryll Brackhaus’s Virasana Empire, only more claustrophobic and sinister.
To keep magicians from turning into witches, there is the Curia Clementia. This is a two-pronged class of non-magical people who are either Vigil or Witchfinder. They are trained from childhood to be soldiers and law enforcers. Vigil have animal familiars—sort of wolf, sort of lion—of varying sizes and degrees of scariness and strength. The Curia keeps the country safe by keeping its population intimidated at all times.
Adrien (his last name is French, and roughly means “out of the furnaces,” which suggests what he’s been through) seems content in his life, although he worries constantly about his lurking mental condition, which is portrayed as a demon (daimon) buried deep in his brain. I wondered if this was a metaphor, or rather a manifestation of a world in which healing is done by magic, and thus the full understanding of human biology is absent.
During one of his classes, Adrien bumps into a young Vigil named Gennady Richter (his names are Russian and German, although never in the book are names referred to with any cultural link we can grasp). At first threatening and rude, Gennady gradually becomes sort of a quasi-student in Adrien’s class. He has been posted by the Curia Clementia to look into rumors of rebellious magicians using magic inappropriately. Since Vigil are not educated, because they don’t need to be, Gennady seems curious about what Adrien does, since nobody has ever taught him anything other than violence.
When young people—both students and Vigil—begin to fall into comas and fill up the wards in the healing district, Adrien and Gennady get drawn into a mystery that threatens both their lives and the entire structure of their world. Adrien only wants to do his job and avoid trouble; while Gennady begins to find his loyalty to Adrien at odds with his own job.
Nakamura is an elegant writer, and her prose is crisp and visually powerful. Without laborious detail, she presents us with a world that creates a foreboding mood against which the increasingly frantic action takes place. Her characters are fascinating and unsettling.
It is not a romantic book. The only love interest Nakamura offers is unrequited. But, I think, there is hope; and, after all, it’s only book 1.
5 stars.
The Reviewer
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