Obtain The Mask Of Mirrors (Rook Rose, #1) Written By M.A. Carrick Issued As File
like the magic system and i thought the main character was cool, i love con artist but gotdamn is this book boring as hell The Mask of Mirrors is a politicallydriven fantasy full of twists and turns that might appeal to fans of The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Intricate worldbuilding, two intersecting magic systems, and dangerous plots come together in this epic narrative,
It is multipov, but the primary character is a lady con artist named Ren on a mission to worm her way into an elite family in the city of Nadezra.
Other characters range from the privileged elite to crime lords of the underworld, and even a notorious vigilante who's like a cross between Batman and Robin Hood.
It includes casually queer characters as well in a society where homophobia doesn't exist, Which is fantastic.
In terms of world and setting, this reads a lot like the Italian city states, but add magic and colonization.
The local magic system involves the reading of cards akin to tarot, while that of the colonizing elite is a more academic form of magic using complex inscriptions.
It's definitely interesting and quite welldeveloped, While this book takes place in a single city, we do learn some things about the wider world as well.
In general, I enjoyed my time with this book, although I do think it's longer than it needs to be.
The pacing of the plot and the revelations is relatively slow and there are a lot of different threads to follow involving a huge cast of interconnected characters.
I imagine some readers will eat up all of the detail woven in, while others will run out of patience for how long it takes to get where it's going and the lack of clear signposting for where the plot is headed.
That said, if this kind of book appeals to you, I think it's a pretty darn good version of what it is.
Personally, I would have preferred a bit tighter pacing, but it was still well worth my time, I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, All opinions are my own, DNF.
I'm bored. No rating. I have received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review,
The Mask of Mirrors was beyond addicting to me, I will admit it did start off pretty well for me but then dragged a little here and there because I kept getting distracted by work and other things.
Yet, once I just focused on this book well, I flew through it, I was honestly completely invested in every single person in this book,
I am still not okay with what went down, Seriously. This book had so many twists in it that my brain was having a hard time keeping up with it all.
At one point, I didn't even realize that my detective cap wasn't on because I wasn't even trying to figure out who the Rook was.
Or anything else.
Other than that, I was definitely getting vibes from other books while reading this beautiful thing, Especially Six of Crows, which I love, Again, a lot happened throughout this book especially towards the end and I'm in complete shock right now,
I need all the revenge that I was just promised and I can't wait to dive into book.
I hope this is an indicator of what's to come for fantasy inbecause I had so much fun with this book, absolutely loved it!
Find this review at sitelinkForever Lost in Literature!
The Mask of Mirrors was one of the firstfantasy releases that I read, and it is giving me some high hopes that this is going to be an amazing year of fantasy releases.
This is the first book in a new fantasy series and it has completely captivated me with it's strong worldbuilding, expansive and developed cast of characters, and overall compelling and richly layered plot.
M. A. Carrick is the pseudonym for authors Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, and the superauthor duo is just as amazing as you might expect they would be.
This basic synopsis for this book highlights that it features a con artist attempting to pull off a rather enormous/hefty con, and while this is indeed the heart of this particular story, it is also one small part of a much bigger and more unpredictable plot that is full of political maneuverings, scheming, and so many secrets.
Every component of this story is important, from the setting to the worldbuilding to the pacing, but the characters were one of the most vital to the plot, and I am so pleased to say that I think the authors did remarkable work in developing such a strong cast of characters that not only contains quite a few characters to follow, but also managed to make each character feel fully developed, fleshed out, and each have an interesting and unique personality as well as backstory and current storyline.
Renata, for all intents and purposes our 'main' protagonist, was a particularly exciting character to follow as we explore both the Ren and Renata versions of her identity aka, the 'real' and 'con' versions of herself and I loved how the authors chose to balance this aspect in a way that really showed how difficult and slippery it can be to play with two identities.
In addition to Renata are a variety of other diverse secondarymain characters that we get perspectives from, such as Vargo, Tess, and and Captain Grey, among others.
Vargo in particular was a character that stood out to me and is easily probably one of my favorites.
He's a great example of the characters in this book in that he's been developed in such a multilayered and nuanced greylike manner that you never really know what he's going to do, but you also can't help but love his personality and find yourself eager to see what he's going to do next.
I also appreciated the detail that went into developing characters, such as Vargo's repulsion to germs and illness, which seems to hint at a phobia of some sort and that I think really helps to develop his character even further in a
variety of ways.
The magic in this book also felt very fresh and exciting and even though we got to explore a lot of what is a part of the magic system, I am really excited for and hoping to experience and learn even more about it in future installments in this series.
It's not an overwhelming sort of magic that is constantly around, it's more subtly pervasive and not always discussed, but is always a part of the story in some manner.
This is also a very political fantasy, so that takes a good portion of the plot, with plenty of scheming to keep everyone including the reader on their toes.
You can never really be entirely sure of what someone's intentions are, and everyone usually seems to have some sort of intention or motivation for any and all actions that undertake.
As other reviews have noted, The Mask of Mirrors has a fairly slow pace to it, but I think that's somewhat to be expected in larger fantasy novels.
To me, it was a good type of slow pace that allowed for the characters, world, setting, and magic system to be slowly built up and evolve in a way that didn't lend to excessive infodumping, but instead let the reader slowly and delightfully immerse themselves into the world.
It's like the person who chooses to very slowly get into a freezing cold pool by moving in slowly, letting themselves adjust tot he temperature, then continue onslow, but a comfortable sort of slow.
Also, I didn't really notice it because I found the characters and plot so intriguing and I think Carrick moves the story along just enough in a consistent fashion, and it is consistency that is often most important to me in any noveland there are plenty of more fastpaced moments throughout that help baance everything out.
Overall, it was an easy five from me! I genuinely cannot wait to continue this series and I anxiously await its publication, even though that may not be for a while.
Omg this book was so good!! It took me a while to read it and get through thosepages but I'm not mad about it because I got even more attached to these characters and the plot.
The Mask of Mirrors follows Ren, a conartist who murdered the leader of her knot after she killed Ren's brother.
With her sister Tess, Ren runs away to try another job, one that could let her be part of the nobility if she succeeds and be able to enjoy the benefits of such a position.
But for that, she'll have to be really smart and put on the mask of Renata, a distant relation trying to reconnect with her family.
She was never meant to care for Leato, Guina or their mother but eventually, she did and so did I.
We also have an evil house that needs to be stopped and the mystery of a cloaked man "The Rook" to figure out.
Overall, this was a very interesting even if can be slow at times and so worth the read.
I cried for some characters and the ending left me shocked , It's not often that authors/books manage to fool me like that especially in Fantasy instead of Thrillers, but wow, I loved everything about it and I cannot wait for book two!!
Thank you for letting me read and review an ARC via Netgalley .
Stars
This is a unique fantasy story filled with mystery, political intrigue and deception, I normally do not read fantasy of manners, but this is one that surpasses the genre, I loved the tone and setting of the story, which created an addictive reading experience,
The challenge of this book came from the length and the large cast of characters, At times, this one was a bit difficult to follow with so many names, places and people to remember.
The novel is very long and I felt like the narrative could have been trimmed into a tighter story.
All that being said, I still enjoyed this one and am eager to read the sequel, Liars Knot.
I strongly suspect I will go to this series more with rereading, which I certainly intend to do before the finale comes out.
I would recommend this new fantasy series to readers looking for a story of deception woven into a world of masks and ballgowns.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Orbit Books, Fortune favors the bold, Magic favors the liars.
Ren is a con artist who has come to the sparkling city of Nadežra with one goal: to trick her way into a noble house, securing her fortune and her sister's future.
But as she's drawn into the elite world of House Traementis, she realizes her masquerade is just one of many surrounding her.
And as nightmare magic begins to weave its way through the City of Dreams, the poisonous feuds of its aristocrats and the shadowy dangers of its impoverished underbelly become tangledwith Ren at their heart.
The Mask of Mirrors is the unmissable start to the Rook amp Rose trilogy, a dazzling and darkly magical fantasy adventure by Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, writing together as M.
A. Carrick. I think I would have loved this one ten years ago when I was still into fantasy costuming and political intrigue and before my tastes shifted toward plants and misanthropy.
The Mask of Mirrors feels a bit like a nostalgia read, a retread of the Paula Volsky and Teresa Edgerton historicalish fantasy I was reading in my twenties.
It's still a heck of a twisty, intricate fantasy with kickass worldbuilding, and I enjoyed it, but twentysomethingJennifer might have loved it.
This is fundamentally a story of con artists living at the edge of the aristocracy: almost all of the major characters are playing a long game, trading in secrets and trying to expose others' while shielding their own.
There's Renata Viraudax, a former street urchin called Arenza posing as the daughter of a disgraced and conveniently absent noblewoman.
There's Derossi Vargo, a trader with connections to the black market and lofty ambitions, And then there's the Rook, a shadowy and semimythical hero who has been protecting the peasant class against the foreign aristocracy for the past two centuries.
True identity: unknown.
The city of Nadezra is a character in its own right with its neighborhoods, its history of violent occupation by the Liganti ruling class over the Vraszenian natives, its aristocratic factions and crime lords and rebellions.
The Mask of Mirrors features duels and masquerades, magical drugs, conspiracies, lies, rapid costume changes to keep up with said lies.
. .
Who wouldn't want to meet a man introduced thus:
And the clothes of the man who had spoken were exquisite even Ren could see that.
Not innovative in the ways Tess could achieve, but the green wool of his coat was as soft as a carpet of stone moss, cut flawlessly so it didn't wrinkle as he moved.
His waistcoat was much darker than Liganti fashion favored, appearing black until it caught the light and flashed emerald, and his coat and collar points rose to his jaw without threatening to wilt.
Renata's gaze passed over an odd, iridescent spider pin clasped to his lapel, then snagged on the jagged scar ripping up the side of his neck, too high for even fine linens and high collars to entirely hide.
The worldbuilding is fabulous and the writing is highly competent without being showy, The pacing is leisurely in parts, but I rarely minded, If I had connected better with the main character, it would have been a five star book, But the problem with having players as main characters people who withhold secrets and reinvent themselves as the situation requires is that it's hard to feel like you really know any of them.
Ren's perspective dominates the book, but she feels distant as she moves between Renata and Arenza and feels increasingly alienated from either.
It's a testament to everything else going for this book that I finished it at allpages is a looooong book for me these days and am looking forward to the sequel.
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