TITLE: The Middling Affliction (Conradverse Chronicles #1)
AUTHOR: Alex Shvartsman
240 pages, CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, ISBN 9781647100544 (paperback, also available in e-book, audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): What would you do if you lost everything that mattered to you, as well as all means to protect yourself and others, but still had to save the day? Conrad Brent is about to find out.
Conrad Brent protects the people of Brooklyn from monsters and magical threats. The snarky, wisecracking guardian also has a dangerous secret: he’s one in a million – literally.
Magical ability comes to about one in every 30,000 and can manifest at any age. Conrad is rarer than this, however. He’s a middling, one of the half-gifted and totally despised. Most of the gifted community feels that middlings should be instantly killed. The few who don’t flat out hate them still aren’t excited to be around middlings. Meaning Conrad can’t tell anyone, not even his best friends, what he really is.
Conrad hides in plain sight by being a part of the volunteer Watch, those magically gifted who protect their cities from dangerous, arcane threats. And, to pay the bills, Conrad moonlights as a private detective and monster hunter for the gifted community. Which helps him keep up his personal fiction – that he’s a magical version of Batman. Conrad does both jobs thanks to charms, artifacts, and his wits, along with copious amounts of coffee. But little does he know that events are about to change his life…forever.
When Conrad discovers the Traveling Fair auction house has another middling who’s just manifested her so-called powers on the auction block, he’s determined to save her, regardless of risk. But what he finds out while doing so is even worse – the winning bidder works for a company that’s just created the most dangerous chemical weapon to ever hit the magical community.
Before Conrad can convince anyone at the Watch of the danger, he’s exposed for what he really is. Now, stripped of rank, magical objects, friends and allies, Conrad has to try to save the world with only his wits. Thankfully though, no one’s taken away his coffee.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: The Middling Affliction kicks off a new urban fantasy series, The Conradverse Chronicles, steeped in the tropes of the genre but also subverting/tweaking them. The mix of standard UF components – snarky but genuine narrator, city’s character playing a key role in the way the story unfolds, lead and supporting characters with secrets to reveal – with Shvartsman’s trademark humor make for a package that feels familiar but new at the same time.
The Middling Affliction is humorous, but it’s not a spoof. It has its comedic moments, but none are at the expense of the genre. This is a writer who very clearly loves urban fantasy. (I’m of a mind to compare it to Seth McFarlane’s SF television series The Orville, which I’m finally watching (currently mid-season two), and in which the creator’s love for Star Trek is clear.) The charm of Shvartsman’s writing is that he takes his characters, their settings, and their situations as seriously as non-humor writers, and then finds ways to work the humor into the whole. And that humor never punches down or plays on stereotypes. Readers familiar with New York City will find some of the jokes/references a bit more pointed than those less familiar, but again the jokes come from a place of love for the city. There are also a lot of punny pop culture references, which is totally my sense of humor, but they aren’t as constant or over-done as in some urban fantasy series.
The magic system Shvartsman has created for this series, in which magic users can be enormously powerful indeed, but in which “middlings” are disdained/targeted for death or abuse, is different enough from other such series that I was immediately intrigued by the implications and wanted to know more.
The pacing of the book is swift, another pleasant change from the norm. In other hands, the fact that Conrad is hiding his “middling” status from even his closest friends and co-workers would have stretched over the first several books of the series with lots of “oops, almost got found out that time” moments. But as the book description makes clear, Conrad is found out in this first book. We get enough scenes to see just how good he is at using artifacts, charms, and quick thinking to fake being a more powerful magic-user, and then the cat is out of the bag – which leads to some interesting twists and expansions on the way magic works that I really loved but which I won’t spoil in this review.
I really came to like Conrad and his supporting cast, including at least two characters you are absolutely supposed to love to hate. I’m hoping The Middling Affliction sells well enough to greenlight sequels.
The Middling Affliction releases in print, e-book, and audio on May 31st, 2022. I read an Advance Reading Copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.