3.0
The Gossamer Mage
ByPublisher Description
Winner of the 2020 Aurora Award for Best Novel, this fantasy epic tells the tale of one mage who must stand against a Deathless Goddess who controls all magic.
Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.
Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer: a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.
For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.
To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.
Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.
Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer: a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage.
For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.
To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities22 Reviews
3.0
Megan Myers
Created 10 months agoShare
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“I listened to this as an audiobook, and I really think I would have benefitted from seeing the words on a page. From being unsure what people's names were to some confusing pivotal moments, reading a physical book would have made things clearer. That being said, I did enjoy the history-like aspects of the book and knowing that this is not always the way things were. I enjoyed the magic system and how things flipped on their heads the more we learned. I thought the Fell was a very interesting concept, very creepy and well done in that way. But again, I would have just really benefited from seeing the words. Would have been a more substantial experience.”
Ash
Created over 1 year agoShare
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Jurate Mamonaite
Created about 2 years agoShare
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fairy bookmother
Created about 2 years agoShare
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“The Gossamer Mage
by Julie E. Czerneda
High Fantasy Myth
Scribd audio
Mages write spells, and they come to life as gossamers, animal or plant like creations but they must pay the price that the Deathless Goddess, the Goddess they worship, requires for these 'intentions'; some of the mage's life. Besides taking their lives little by little, growing old within a few years, they can't help themselves, because this power is addictive.
But one mage wants to put a stop to the Goddess, but during his quest to find the right spell/intention, he finds that there is something else that wants to end her, but if it does, it will end everything.
This was a very interesting story, but too bad the audio narrator didn't do that good of a job. She didn't give any pause between the changing of characters, and there were a lot of characters. I'd hope that in the book there would be an extra space singling a change of some sort, but the narrator did not pause, she went right into the next section and I was left trying to figure out what was going on, and what I missed, and I jumped back the audio to figure it out. Luckily I was doing the dishes at the time, but I couldn't keep doing that because most of the time I'm driving while listening, so I spent most of my time hoping I would figure out what was going on before something else changed. But there were times she would pause right in the middle of someone's dialogue, and there were weird times when I thought it had shut off, but then she starts talking again.
There were 'chapters' in the book about the 'history' of this world, but for me they weren't that telling, thus leaving me with more questions about this world, and sadly the narrator didn't change her 'tone' so it sounded like more of the story thus leaving a period of confusion of what it had to do with the character that was just talking.
Her narration style also made it hard to tell some characters apart. The 'master mages' had the same last few letters on the end of their names, and some of the names sounded way too much alike. Yes, if I'd been reading it I would've been able to sight the difference, but sadly the narrator didn't take the similar sounding names into consideration as she read, and because I listened, that is what I am rating my review on.
The story was original, and spells having to be written in order to be cast was a new idea instead of the usual storyline, plus the spells became something instead of being cast for flying or the such.
I'm thinking that if I had read this story I could've given it a higher rating, but the audio version leaves my rating as...
2 Stars”
About Julie E. Czerneda
Julie E. Czerneda is a biologist and best-selling writer whose science fiction has received international acclaim. She is the author of the popular Species Imperative trilogy, the Web Shifters series, and the Clan Chronicles novels. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her stand-alone novel, In the Company of Others, won Canada's Prix Aurora Award and was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished SF. Her Night’s Edge series, A Turn of Light and A Play of Shadow, won the Aurora Award for Best English Novel in two consecutive years. Julie has edited/co-edited sixteen SFF anthologies, including the Aurora-winning Space Inc. and Under Cover of Darkness. Julie lives with her husband and two children in the lake country of central Ontario, under skies so clear they could take seeing the Milky Way for granted, but never do.
Other books by Julie E. Czerneda
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