“Have a quick ten years.”
The debut novel by author Vic James is set in modern day England, where magic is real. Forget about any kind of Harry Potter comparisons though, because in this England the magic users are the nobility, and everyone else is required by law to spend ten years as a slave. Ten years serving those society calls the Equals, with no rights and no control over your own life. It’s up to you to choose when to complete those ten years, but just remember: Do your slavedays too old, you’ll never get through them. Do your slavedays too young, you’ll never get over them.
Luke Hadley’s older sister Abi has a plan for the entire family to serve their ten years fairly comfortably on the luxurious Kyneston estate. Something goes wrong on the first day though, and Luke is instead sent to the dreary factory town Millmoor. The rest of his family will still work for the Jardines, and they’ll have to try to survive the political intrigues, ancient secrets, and magical abuses that surround the most powerful (and power-hungry) family in the country.
The novel opens with Gavar, the oldest son of the Jardine family, murdering a slave woman who’d had the bad sense to fall in love with him and then try to escape with their infant daughter. So right off the bat I thought we were in for a Gothic story of aristocrats torturing their powerless servants.
And let’s be fair, there is a lot of that in this book. Some Equals feel that Commoners needed to be treated kindly, regardless of whether or not they’re slaves at the time. Most of them though believe that Commoners are automatically a lesser species than Equals, and going out of your way to be kind to slaves makes about as much sense as saying thank you to the chicken you just roasted for dinner.
But the author has created some very complex characters for this book, ones that aren’t all the way “good” or “bad”, or at least the very bad ones have the occasional moment of humanity. Gavar, for instance, loves his illegitimate daughter. He’s always patient with her, resents anything that keeps him away from her too long, and he’s even reasonably polite to anyone taking care of her. It doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s a terrible person, that he lashes out when he loses his temper (or when he’s drunk), uses his magical Skill for horrible reasons and, oh yes, that he murdered the mother of his child. But I did feel the occasional twinge of sympathy whenever he has to deal with his domineering father.
Then there were the confiscated leaflets. “We BLEED beneath their WHIP,” one had read. Crude propagandist trash, Bouda had thought. As if anyone used whips these days.
Then there are the characters that are less conflicted, but still fascinating. Lord Whittam Jardine is a ruthless monster. Gavar’s fiancee, Bouda Matravers, is a cold-hearted, spiteful bitch, but also crafty and intelligent. If any woman is going to be able to claw her way to the top in this world, it’s most likely going to be her. Silyen Jardine is the youngest son of the Jardine family, but also the hardest to understand and the one with the most magical Skill. And the middle son Jenner…well Jenner seems to be a genuinely good person, which is one of the many reasons that Abi Hadley falls head-over-heels for him.
Abi went bright red. She’d be working alongside him. It was a nightmare and a dream wrapped in one thrilling but super-awkward parcel, bow-tied and with a gift tag saying “crush.”
The book keeps things interesting by alternating between several different viewpoints, but it’s the chapters headed by Abi and her brother Luke that give us the most details about life in this dystopian England. Luke suffers through his slavedays in Millmoor with the people who do all the work in this society – and occasionally die doing it – while Abi gets to experience life in the shining, magic-created houses of the elite who reap the rewards from all this work. The most disturbing part of all of that to me was how ingrained it is in every slave that they have to try to get through ten years of their lives as fast as possible. They’ll never benefit from any of this work, so they have literally no reason to care if the work is being done well.
If you’re starting to see some parallels with real life here and it’s making you uncomfortable, well good, because I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to. The author never gets preachy about it, but it’s clear she thinks that letting one small percentage of the population make the rules, and then use their power and money to write new rules that will allow them to stay in power, is a terrible idea.
The story moves fast, and we jump from family tragedy to civil unrest to a secret group in Millmoor trying to start a revolution. The reader learns about how things can always get worse for a slave, and then learns it again by seeing the kind of magical punishment that’s dished out by a society that thinks that execution isn’t cruel enough. Luke finds friendship and a cause that would actually make him want to stay in Millmoor, (and participates in a prison break that took some planning and an amazing amount of nerve) while Abi sees some of the cruelty that’s always just under the surface. And every chapter we find out a little more about the history of the alternate-universe that the author has created.
If you think a book about legal slavery and the oppression of most of the population is going to finish with good triumphing over evil and the aristocrats deciding to treat the Commoners like human beings then you haven’t been paying attention. I’m still mad at Vic James for what she did to the characters at one point, and even though this book isn’t due to be released until February, I want a sequel now, because the first book ends on a cliffhanger and there’s still so much that hasn’t been explained yet. And a lot of that revolves around Silyen, who has some very convoluted plans to use his Skill that he isn’t explaining to anyone, least of all the reader.