William Ray reviewed The Finder of the Lucky Devil by Megan Mackie
Review of 'The Finder of the Lucky Devil' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A really fun read with a unique style.
The opening chapter feels heavy and dark, and by the end of it, I was a little worried that this was going to be too much of a grim cyberpunk dystopia for me. In total contrast, the second chapter feels like a light barroom frolic with a plethora of nearly-cartoonish magical creatures. Had the second chapter been like the first, I'd have quit reading, but had the first chapter been like the second, I'd not have gone any further -- but the balance of the two left me curious about the world that held both.
A tale of corporate intrigue, magical intrigue, and romance, spools out from that contrast. Mackie's world is a dark corporate dystopia overlaid on ancient laws of magic. Shadowrun's Tolkien + Gibson is an obvious parallel, but really doesn't quite capture the feeling of Lucky Devil's setting. The …
A really fun read with a unique style.
The opening chapter feels heavy and dark, and by the end of it, I was a little worried that this was going to be too much of a grim cyberpunk dystopia for me. In total contrast, the second chapter feels like a light barroom frolic with a plethora of nearly-cartoonish magical creatures. Had the second chapter been like the first, I'd have quit reading, but had the first chapter been like the second, I'd not have gone any further -- but the balance of the two left me curious about the world that held both.
A tale of corporate intrigue, magical intrigue, and romance, spools out from that contrast. Mackie's world is a dark corporate dystopia overlaid on ancient laws of magic. Shadowrun's Tolkien + Gibson is an obvious parallel, but really doesn't quite capture the feeling of Lucky Devil's setting. The magic here is more faerie tale than D&D, and the dystopia is less obsessed with data and privacy than it is with the feeling of passing through overlapping company towns. It feels believably inconvenient, at times painfully likely, and underlaid with strange mysteries of magic that many in the setting treat with a believable sort of mundane blase, even when that's to their own detriment. The setting remains a grim corporate dystopia, but the counterpoint makes it feel like a livable one.
Mackie's narrative voice is also uniquely feminine in a way I find difficult to explain. It's not that the story feels exclusive to a female audience (far from it), but rather that there's an unusually clear feminine voice in the narration. I've read many, many sci-fi and fantasy stories by female authors, and with female protagonists, but generally the tone feels more gender neutral. I could not explain to you how Mackie creates that feeling exactly, but somehow through word choice and sentence structure she does, and it lends a refreshingly unique narrative perspective to even the most familiar tropes.
It's a great read for fans of cyberpunk and urban fantasy alike.
