.alanajoli reviews TheFaithless, the complex and powerful second installment in C_L_Clark's 'Magic of the Lost' series.
hit shelves in March 2021, readers were launched into a lush new world of empire and colony—a world that soldier Touraine had to navigate with perfect balance as a person raised and employed by the nation that conquered her people’s homeland. Thrust into direct conflict with people who both looked like her and who still practiced the culture she had been denied by strict imperial schooling, Touraine managed her conflicting feelings deftly, believing that she knew who she was.
Part of that sense of complexity is absolutely due to how deeply drawn Clark’s characters are—not just Touraine and Luca, whose struggles with knowing themselves, and knowing the people they want to be and become, are so genuinely felt.
That’s before even considering the magic, which is as mysterious to the reader as it is to Touraine—denied access to information about her religious heritage in her colonial schooling—and Luca, who is searching for a past her entire nation denies. But the mystery, and the capriciousness of the gods, does nothing to diminish the sheer coolness of the magic when it works.
The deadly dance Touraine and Luca play, both with their nations and with each other, is both graceful and tense. Their attraction, both romantically and in the way binary stars might orbit each other, is palpable, both beautiful and terrible in it potency. The romance here is just as complicated as the characters themselves, and neither character can simply feel without knowing all the weight of what has come before.
We’ll just have to suffer an agonizing wait between now and then. But I have faith it will be worth it.
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