Dark Apprentice: Fall of Magic Book One

Nikolai is a young wizard with high aspirations. He wishes to achieve immortality and become a grandmaster of dark magic. But he’s currently apprenticed to a mage who hasn’t been quite satisfactory and he is stuck in a town where dark magic is banned. He’s desperate to learn from Medea, an immortal mage with a reputation of killing all her apprentices and he goes to great lengths to manipulate her into accepting him. He gets what he wants but he’s still not happy and spends all his time working out ways to avoid doing the work she asks of him. He also becomes chronically unwell and thinks it’s all the work of Medea.

Medea has lived a very long time and has taken on many apprentices. But once they become competent they all try to kill her. And so her reputation, which isn’t great to begin with, has taken quite a few knocks. She long ago decided she wouldn’t take on another apprentice. Nikolai’s persistence wins out, despite her misgivings, and soon she has an apprentice who makes her wish she had never taken him on.

Nikolai has to be one of the most unlikeable protagonists I’ve ever run across. He is cocky and selfish and has no interest in working at getting better at his magic. He spends most of his time trying to manipulate others. At times he is amazingly stupid and I did wonder how he managed to get through the academy he previously attended. He’s very much an anti-hero and there is almost no room for sympathy for him. Essentially a psychopath.

On the other hand, Medea is quite old and you would think she has gained a lot of wisdom from her experience. Within the realm of magic, this might be true but when it comes to other humans she still has a certain naivety and often misreads people and situations. In other words, quite typically autistic.

These two don’t exactly work well very well together and it’s often a wonder Nikolai learns anything at all. He is so resistant to learning things Medea’s way that he wastes enormous amounts of time and gets into all sorts of difficulty. It’s almost comical how ridiculous he behaves in one situation after another. Meanwhile, Medea carries on with him anyway because of her promise, which she fully intends to honor so long as he wishes to continue.

Although I did enjoy this a lot in the end, I had a hard time dealing with the character of Nikolai. It’s hard to stick with a character I don’t like at all. Thank goodness we got to see and hear from Medea’s point of view or I might not have persisted. I did like that this was not the straightforward master and apprentice story. It really veers off course from books I’ve read in the past and adds a new dimension to a genre that has been copied repeatedly.

Overall I give this four solid stars.

Thank you to Books Sirens and Living Relic Press for sharing an advanced reader copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.