Wow. This is a good one.

Here’s a link to the book: http://amzn.to/1UmwKhE

I download several free ebooks every week. I start a lot and bail once I get bored or get angry that the writer is going with some tired-out cliche.

So I started Sora’s Quest in that frame of mind — looking for an excuse to delete this book.

And this book is a fantasy book, which is a genre filled with the worst crap. Especially at the free tier. Honestly, once self-published ebooks became a thing, petabytes of beastmaster erotic fan fiction burst out on the internet.

So, like I said, I wasn’t optimistic.

But the first chapter was pretty good. A guy discovers his brother has just been assassinated moments before. He uses some magic to track down the assassin that is making his escape.

Magic is to fantasy what time travel is to science fiction. It’s hard to pull off well! Skilled fantasy writers bring something novel to the mechanics of magic works. And they explain it just enough so I understand why people do what they do. But they keep the plot moving.

Unskilled writers forget that they’re on borrowed time. They shift from the story line to an exposition of their made-up metaphysics, and it just kills the momentum.

Or even worse, they use something blatantly yanked from elsewhere. That’s usually a sign I’m reading something like a book version of those horrible bar bands that cover currently popular songs.

But this author introduced magic in this world cleverly and succinctly. Blood magic requires sacrificing living things.

The magician catches up with the assassin, but the assassin turns out to be way more difficult to kill than expected, and the magician gets wounded in the fight while the assassin gets away. And the chapter ends with the magician swearing to avenge his brother’s murder.

The story hops in perspective to follow Sora, a 17-year-old noble lady, preparing for something like a society debut. Her mother disappeared when she was an infant and her dad is an aloof jerk, mostly interested in getting her to marry into a family that will improve his status.

Lily is Sora’s maid, and their relationship reminds me of the dynamics between the maids and the ladies in Downton Abbey.

Anyhow, the coming out ball begins, and then Sora performs her “blooming” dance, and then accidentally falls down, which is just an awfully embarrassing thing.

But then the skylight above the ballroom shatters, and her father is gravely injured. Sora realizes that this was no accident when she runs into an assassin in the hallway who is about to kill her, but then decides to take her with him as a hostage.

And that’s the end of the second chapter. I was hooked. And I was surprised by how much I liked this book. Every chapter after that pulled me in more. The story bounces between the magician tracking down his brother’s murderer, and Sora who has been kidnapped by that same assassin. The story starts off following the magician, and we sympathize with him wanting to avenge his brother. But then by switching to the perspective of the people he is hunting down, and by coloring them in enough, the reader ends up empathizing with that crew as well. It becomes clear that they have their own sense of morality that’s not so different after all, especially given their situation.

So it’s not clear who are the heroes and the villains. Everyone is just trying to survive.

And there’s a gorgeous twist at the 80% mark that I really enjoyed.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed too often about female characters in the fantasy genre. They’re usually damsels in distress or basically Xena Warrior Princess ice cold commando types. They’re paper-thin characters that are completely predictable and unrelatable.

But Sora comes off (to me, at least) as real. And she evolves and adapts plausibly. She’s not a brat and she’s not a robot.

Last thing — the author clearly spent a ton of time daydreaming and constructing this world’s history. There are all sorts of little hints about it all. Humanity won some “war of the five races” thanks to using anti-magic devices, and the other races are now almostly extinct. I really liked how she described the old civilizations (spoiler: author is a girl).

I just bought the sequel to this one. It seems to follow the assassin and for the first time we get to see into his thoughts. He’s an opaque dead-eyed killer for most of Sora’s Quest, and I hoped we’d find out his back story.

Honestly, this is an exciting story in a fantasy world that’s different from the usual Tolkien-inspired elves and dwarves tropes we’ve all read a million bazillion times. And an interesting female character!