I knew this was set a generation after The Death of the Necromancer, about Nicholas Valiarde’s daughter, and that Ile-Rien was at war. But after Tremaine and some of her companions discover a portal to another world, instead of reminding me of the earlier Ile-Rien books or fiction about wartime in London, this actually felt reminiscent of Wells’ Books of the Raksura: the action-driven pace of the story; the personalities and group dynamics, and especially the imaginative worldbuilding, with a long-ago abandoned city and the culture of Ilias’ people. Lots of things Wells does so very well.

It took a few chapters but I became completely engrossed. I abandoned my plans of reading others books next in favour of immediately embarking upon the sequels.

“It’s like you’re two people. One of them is a flighty artist, and I like her. The other one is bloody-minded and ruthless and finds scary things funny, and I’m not sure if I like her very much; but whenever we’re about to die, she’s the one who gets all three of us through it alive.” She pressed her lips together, then asked seriously, “Which one are you? I’d really like to know.”
Tremaine [...] wasn’t happy to hear something said aloud that she herself had been mentally dancing around for far too long. She couldn’t tell Florian which one she really was when she didn’t know herself. ( )

Probably my favorite so far. Nifty characters all around. ( )

A culture that embraces wizards is threatened by a culture that seeks to eliminate it. ( )

This highly-imaginative fantasy story is full of wonders and adventure! The Wizard Hunters inspired me to create my own world and write my first novel.

If a sarcastic heroine, tech-integrated magic, airships, and new worlds appeal to you, then I'd definitely recommend this series. ( )

The Wizard Hunters takes place in the same setting as some of Martha Wells’s previous novels, most notably Death of the Necromancer, but is the start to a new trilogy. I didn’t find it to be among Martha Wells’s best outings, but it was still an enjoyable fantasy novel.

If Death of the Necromancer has parallels to the Victorian era, The Wizard Hunters has clear parallels to World War II. Basically, it’s taking Ile-Rien, a setting I’ve grown to love through Wells’s previous books, and literally blowing it up. For Ile-Rien is under attack from a mysterious and unknown enemy, the Gardier, who’s black airships seem to appear out of nowhere and who display no mercy.

I think The Wizard Hunters would have had a lot less of an impact on me if I hadn’t read Death of the Necromancer. The most emotional part of the book for me was seeing the destruction wrecked on a setting I’d loved and the dire fates of the previous book’s cast.

But The Wizard Hunters itself wasn’t that great. I wouldn’t call it bad, but it falls more in the category of mediocre. What draws me again and again to Martha Wells’s work is the imagination she displays in crafting her worlds, but both worlds of The Wizard Hunters (there’s two) felt like places I’d seen before. I really love the overall idea – mysterious invaders from another world appearing out of no where. It was sort of a fantasy take on alien invasion. However, there wasn’t much I found thrilling about the book. I was mostly tepid on how the plot played out and the new character cast, and I did have trouble remembering who some of the minor characters were.

All that said, I may give the second book in the trilogy a shot at some point, it just won’t be high up on my to read list. So far I haven’t read a novel by Martha Wells that I’ve outright disliked or even not enjoyed enough to finish. And I do have enough lingering interest in the invasion plotline to want to see how everything plays out.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page. ( )