MY ⭐️ RATING: 5/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Seven powerful mages want to make the world a better place. We’re going to kill them first.’
Picture a wizard. Go ahead, close your eyes. There he is, see? Skinny old guy with a long straggly beard. No doubt he’s wearing iridescent silk robes that couldn’t protect his frail body from a light breeze. The hat’s a must, too, right? Big, floppy thing, covered in esoteric symbols that would instantly show every other mage where this one gets his magic? Wouldn’t want a simple steel helmet or something that might, you know, protect the part of him most needed for conjuring magical forces from being bashed in with a mace (or pretty much any household object).
Now open your eyes and let me show you what a real war mage looks like . . . but be warned: you’re probably not going to like it, because we’re violent, angry, dangerously broken people who sell our skills to the highest bidder and be damned to any moral or ethical considerations.
At least, until such irritating concepts as friendship and the end of the world get in the way.
My name is Cade Ombra, and though I currently make my living as a mercenary wonderist, I used to have a far more noble-sounding job title – until I discovered the people I worked for weren’t quite as noble as I’d believed. Now I’m on the run and my only friend, a homicidal thunder mage, has invited me to join him on a suicide mission against the seven deadliest mages on the continent.
Time to recruit some very bad people to help us on this job . . .
MY REVIEW
If there’s one thing I know by now, it’s that I’m going to enjoy the hell out of whatever de Castell writes, and The Malevolent Seven, was exactly what I was expecting, wanting and needing. De Castell has a unique style to the way he writes his first person POV’s, because The Malevolent Seven reminds me a lot of his Greatcoats series, but instead of swashbuckling good guys, it’s anti-hero mages who come together on an adventure to take down a powerful enemy. There’s some fun in the way he tells a story, and the way his main character breaks the 4th wall by speaking to the reader to give some understanding to situations. It’s hilarious, dark and full of misdirections.
I honestly had so much fun reading and listening to this because first of all, the characters were more than fantastic and the banter between them was absolutely hilarious. The main character, Cade Ombra and his closest friend Corrigan made everything so much better, because there was a huge love/hate type of relationship between the two that I couldn’t get enough of. The other characters of this no good band of heathen’s get introduced as the story goes on, similar to the way Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames and Never Die by Rob J Hayes introduce their extra characters. The characters are so diverse and flawed in different ways from one another and yet work so perfectly together.
“Nothing that moves gets to stay clean for long. All you do get to do is decide which river of shit you’re going to swim in on the way to oblivion, and do your best not to drown in it on the way there.”
I got excited when I realized that the narration is done by Joe Jameson, who also narrates de Castell’s The Greatcoats series. He did exactly as great as I expected him to with another phenomenal job, and I highly suggest doing the audio or whispersync the way I did to experience his narration. He brought the characters to life and gave them such differing voices that you couldn’t confuse from one another, and even the jokes that de Castell wrote were made even funnier by the way Jameson delivered the lines. Though I will say, and this is no knock, that the voices are similar to those of The Greatcoats, but there’s only so many voices a narrator can make, so I didn’t mind at all, just made it better for me.
This is easily one of my favorite reads of the year and I highly recommend this to everyone, if you’re looking for something fun and easy to read. To me, de Castell is an author that I will go out of my way to read because I know it’s going to be good. I can’t say enough how fun to read this was, it was so much fun that every opportunity I got to read and listen to this, I did. So much so, that I finished it in 3 days. If you haven’t read it yet, I would also recommend giving his Greatcoats series a shot. It’s just as hilarious and done in the same first person, breaking the 4th wall narrative.
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