“And when the last of the traitors had been executed, the young Autarch made a decree: Henceforth all citizens of Aygrima would be Masked in all public places…”
The Masks are what makes the kingdom of Aygrima safe, everybody knows that. Enchanted to reveal treasonous thoughts, they protect the rule of the blessed Autarch from rebellion. And sure, Mara worries a little about whether the Masks change people, and she hasn’t been completely truthful about how much magic she’s still able to see. But it’s okay, the celebration for her fifteenth birthday is almost here, and as the Gifted daughter of the Master Maskmaker she’ll have the most beautiful Mask her father can make, and she’ll join Aygrima society as an adult and her father’s apprentice and it will all be fine.
Then her Masking goes horribly wrong, and Mara finds herself one of the unMasked. Outcast and doomed to spend the rest of her life as a slave in the Mines, Mara learns that everything’s she’s been told about the blessed Autarch’s reign is a lie. More than that, there are fellow outcasts working to overthrow the powerful Autarchy, and Mara has to decide if she can trust them as she tries to learn the extent of her own impossibly powerful magical talents.
The striking cover by Paul Young was what first caught my attention, and a world where every adult has to be masked in public sounded promising. I would have liked to see a little more about how that world was formed. An entire population was convinced in the space of a few years to wear masks that will catch even a thought of disloyalty; it would have been nice to see how that happened. But the details about a society where your status is reflected in your mask is exactly the sort of thing I like to read about. Everyone’s mask is unique: the designs show your occupation, the colored masks are for people with magical gifts – red for enchantment, blue for healing, etc. – and the more powerful your magical talent the brighter the color. Even on a normal day, the city streets in such a society would look like a Masquerade.
Mara starts out as an ordinary child in this world. She’s intelligent, rather sweet, adores her parents, and is about as rebellious as any teenager who knows she only has a little more time left to do things like swimming in an off limits pool or running around after curfew. Even the fact that she deliberately hides her ability to see all colors of magic (instead of just one, like every other Gifted citizen) feels perfectly normal. She’s been looking forward to becoming her father’s apprentice as a Maskmaker, and it’s very believable that she would just stay quiet and hope the problem goes away on its own, rather than let everyone know that there’s possibly something…wrong with her.
It’s only after her failed Masking that Mara stops being quite such a believable character.
After the rejection by her Mask (fast, brutal, and damn near fatal) she’s then torn away from her family forever. Mara deals with becoming a slave as bravely as she can. Just like she deals with being pulled from the slave wagon by bandits. And then kidnapped and enslaved again. And then freed by bandits again. And then going on a rescue mission and falling into the hands of the enemy and having to be rescued. Again. Mara is dragged from location to location, the secret rebellion finds her without any effort on her part, and healers repeatedly show up just in time to keep her from being crippled or killed. I thought at first that all of this was due to Mara’s mysterious ability to see all colors of magic, but the repeated kidnappings and rescues always seem to have another motive. Things happen to Mara because it’s convenient for her to be at point A to learn backstory B and have life-changing experience C.
Exposition is handled the same way. The history of Aygrima is conveyed by children reciting their lessons, and the action comes to a screeching halt at multiple points while someone spends half a chapter explaining the latest plot point to Mara, or to have Mara explain things we’ve already seen to everyone else. I think there are at least four different times where the phrase “and then Mara told them all the story of what happened” or something similar is used, and if we hadn’t picked up on the fact that Mara’s suffering has been relentlessly dark at times then we’ll be reminded in detail every time she wakes up screaming from the latest dream of killing to protect herself from being raped.
And this would be the element of the book that bothered me the most: the constant threat of sexual violence. Yes, fifteen-year-olds thrown into slavery would be vulnerable to anyone who has power over them, but it was the only motivation for most of the villains: the creepy artist who draws naked unMasked girls, fellow unMasked prisoners, the Warden and, oh yeah, all of the guards, anywhere. One tertiary character was molested by her father, another woman in a hospital was obviously strangled during an orgy, and Mara’s good behavior is secured by threatening to send a fellow prisoner to the Barracks to be a plaything for the guards. It’s as if the author had exactly one tool to drive the plot, and it was “Threaten her with rape”.
The bad guys become progressively more and more one-dimensional, but not just the bad guys; a character towards the end of the book is just done with all the Rapey McRaperstons, and she lashes out at Mara with cringingly awful dialog complete with maniacal laughter and the phrase “meddling fool.” Mara herself gets very close to Mary Sue status. Her magical talents break most of the rules that that author laid down at the start, she can magically repair cloth and throw up force shields by instinct (no years-long training required) and of course she ends up being fought over by two of the three boys her own age who aren’t stock sexual predator stereotypes. And when Mara actually chooses to do something she makes at least one very bad decision that gets someone killed, and possibly several someones. But no one ever calls her on this, because everyone can tell she’s already spent a few paragraphs agonizing over it.
I really did like the whole concept of this world that E.C, Blake created. Having magic be something that has to be harvested or collected is a neat concept, and every new setting that appeared was something fascinating, like the secret city built into the side of a mountain, or the hellish human-powered mechanism that carries slaves into the mines. But the history and society of this world has got to be fleshed out beyond school lessons and exposition, and Mara needs to become an actual protagonist instead of a mostly passive witness. As it is now, she could practically wear a sign that says “Chosen One”, and sooner or later she’s going to have a shadowy figure tell her that the Dark Side is her DESTINY, which won’t be good for anyone.