2019 fantasy. Oliver is a very minor mage; he has some talent, but
he's twelve, and he only knows three spells. But when the village is
desperate for rain, and when a mob gets started, he finds himself (and
his familiar) forced out with only the vaguest of instructions…
It's a bit of a change from the paladin-focused romances of the
last couple of Kingfisher books I've read. Apparently this was
originally pitched as a book for teenage readers, but the publisher
rejected it as such; I suspect that this may be because the leessons
Oliver learns on his quest are some of the really hard ones, which sit
slightly uncomfortably with the cosy familiar trappings of fantasy
adventure. (All right, Vernon's ghuls aren't exactly standard
fantasy ghouls, and nor are her bandits exactly like standard fantasy
bandits, but you can work out from the name roughly what they're
like.)
Also there's an armadillo, Oliver's familiar, and if I see a certain
resemblance to Mousebones in The Raven and the Reindeer and the
weasel in Summer in Orcus I really don't mind; the small snarky
sidekick is a type that Vernon writes really well. There's also some
consideration of just what a familiar is and how that relationship
might work.
It is, in the end, a fantasy quest, go to the place and do the thing,
and it's hard to do much innovative with that. Even so, Vernon has
written something that manages to stand out.