2024 urban fantasy, first of a trilogy. Sierra was taken to High Earth
as a child and taught magic… and was then dumped back in our own
non-magical world. She is very angry.
I thought the world-building for this sounded interesting, and it
is: there are four Earths altogether, but High takes the magic from
Low (ours) for its own benefit (and Light, where the angels come from,
does the same to Dark). But that's not what this book is about; the
book is about magical fights with lots of special effects,
interspersed with Sierra being fanatical and expecting to die.
Which I suppose is fine if that's what you want. I never felt any
sense of tension in the fights: obviously Sierra's going to prevail,
except in the last fight of the book when she'll have to make some
sort of concession to raise tension for volume 2, and sure enough
that's what happens. Oh, and of course she gets a hot demon boyfriend,
whose job at this point is to be just as dedicated to the cause as she
is (so that even she notices him) but less broken and suicidal.
I'd never realized that my type is a man who can appreciate how
competent I am and is dedicated to helping me achieve what I'm
capable of without trying to overshadow me.
Lady, if that's a revelation to you it's not just the fantasy world
that messed you up.
Although the mechanics of magical fighting are largely mutable for
plot purposes, I did come up with an idea for winning against a vastly
more powerful opponent that nobody here seems to have thought of.
(Since holding too much magical power causes a fatal bodily reaction,
stroke or heart attack or similar, you feed someone way more power
than they can handle so quickly that they can't get rid of it.) I
wonder if anyone will think of it in book 2 or 3.
There was nothing I hated here, but I never felt dragged into the
story. It was just sort of there, until it wasn't. There are two
more volumes but I doubt I'll bother.