Some fantasy heroines discover magic because an owl shows up, a mysterious stranger knocks on the door, or somebody finally tells them they’ve secretly been special all along.
But Kaija Jokiharju doesn’t get anything that clean, because Cursed Mage starts with grief.
Kaija’s father's dead, her family life's a mess, and she’s doing what she does best when the rest of her world refuses to cooperate: focusing on the next objectives that involve getting into college, taking advantage of the scholarship, starting over, and to keep moving.
That would be difficult enough, but when she discovers the guy she’s interested in is already dead, that only makes Kaija’s situation stranger.
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It’s dark paranormal fantasy wearing a college-fantasy jacket
Cursed Mage sits in a spot I’ve always wanted more fantasy books to explore:
It’s set in a modern world where technology exists alongside elemental magic, old institutions, spirits, hidden histories, political power, and people who know far more than Kaija does.
So you get pieces of several genres at once, with the university element, the supernatural mystery built around a dead young man whose story doesn’t add up, elemental fantasy, with Water, Earth, Spirit and other forces getting far more important than Kaija initially understands, and the family drama, because Kaija isn’t moving through this story without baggage.
Finally, there’s a conspiracy-thriller streak running underneath all of it, because Kaija has one personality trait that gets increasingly inconvenient for the wrong people:
She asks questions and demands answers.
Kaija isn’t the heroine who patiently waits for the lore dump
Kaija can be impulsive, abrasive, obsessive, and decide she wants an answer and keep pulling until somebody either gives it to her or gives her another reason to distrust them.
She’s also damaged without being passive. Her father’s death, the conditions she grew up in, and the disturbing facts she discovers as the book progresses all hurt, but Kaija’s instinct isn’t to sit around hoping somebody more knowledgeable fixes everything.
She investigates, lies when she thinks she needs to, follows people she shouldn’t, and sticks her nose into places where every survival instinct screams at her to turn around. Sometimes she gets away with it because she’s smart, but also because she’s stubborn. Often, those two qualities are exactly what get her in trouble or burrow her into a deeper hole.
The magic isn’t there just to make the fights look cool
Like most of my books in the fantasy genre, Cursed Mage has elemental magic, but the magic system isn’t separated from the mystery.
The deeper Kaija digs, the more magic – mainly Water and Spirit – gets tangled with ancestry, institutions, history, family, death, and questions about who gets to control knowledge in the first place. The mystery surrounding one dead man gradually points toward something larger than Kaija’s mind could’ve imagined when she first walked into Fenn University.
The magical world (and Mage Society) Kaija stumbles across has rules, but it’s not long before she finds out that rules and truth aren’t the same thing.
Cursed Mage is only the doorway
Things get even more intense in Book II, Astray Mage. Her relationship with a long-lost blood relative gets increasingly important in the most unpredictable ways, her Water magic has room to grow, institutions surrounding them get more prominent, and Mage Society reveals just how much exists beyond the mystery that originally pulled Kaija into it.
Cursed Mage is about crossing that first threshold in an eventual hero’s journey, but Astray Mage is what happens once Kaija realizes the threshold was the least dangerous part.
That’s also why I’ve made Cursed Mage's e-book completely free inside The Rebel Lore Vault. If Kaija, elemental magic, supernatural mysteries, morally gray characters, magical universities, and modern dark paranormal fantasy with larger stakes than your average novel gives you sound like your kind of thing, you can start the Catenarian Chronicles without paying anything.
And if Kaija hooks you, Astray Mage is available for $4.99. When you order Astray Mage, you can dive deeper with two free companion stories, Deceived Mage and Shadow Mage, both of which open up different corners of the Catenarian Chronicles and the world surrounding Kaija’s story.
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