The Black Prism, by Brent Weeks

I’m not sure how this book sat on my To Read list so long without being read, but thankfully, due to the disaster of the library being closed on Memorial Day and a friend willing to loan me books when I’m in book-less fix, I finally read it!

Kip considers himself mostly useless: clumsy, awkward, overweight, never quite succeeding in anything. When his town refuses to pay a tax and the new king comes and razes the down to the ground to make an example of them, Kip can’t save his friends, or his mother. He does find out that he can use green light as magic.

The magic in this world is light and color based. “Drafters” or people who can do magic with light, have a propensity towards one or two other colors that they can use to make things out of—bounded only by their imagination and the qualities inherent in the light they’re using. The Prism is the most powerful man in the world, the head of religion, and the only one who can do magic from any color at all.

So Kip temporarily staves off death at the hands of the invading army by discovering he’s a drafter, but he isn’t good at it, so he gets himself captured and is about to be executed. Then the Prism, Gavin Guile, who everyone thought was miles away in the capital city, flies through the air, drops down to the earth, and rescues him. Also Kip turns out to be Gavin’s illegitimate son, and Gavin offers to take him back to the capital to be educated.

But being a drafter and related to someone important doesn’t change who Kip is—still self-conscious, awkward, and desperate to prove himself. And suddenly discovering that he has, to all appearances, an illegitimate son, doesn’t make Gavin Guile’s life of secrets any easier either. 

I love the magic concept in this. It’s one of those magic-ideas that verges on science fiction because it’s so detailed—just sci-fi with different rules for physics, is all. The magic also skews the world out of the traditional Fantasy World themes, just like Kip’s ineptitude puts a different slant on the Chosen One themes.

 It’s a difficult book to give a general idea of the plot without giving away the great twists—Weeks does a fantastic job of hiding and then revealing secrets at the exact right time, and Gavin Guile is a wonderfully layered character because of all his secrets. It did seem a little over-violent at times, but I may be unduly sensitive to that right now because of trauma suffered at the hands of another book series that I’m reading.  

I always end these with some sort of “that was good, you should read it,” kind of statement. I was about to say that it’s a fairly obvious thing to say since I wouldn’t be reviewing it if I didn’t think it was worth reading. But I may someday review a book purely to excoriate it. So in case I ever don’t recommend a book I read, I’ll clarify: this one, I liked.