At this time of summer I usually recommend something suitable for holiday reading. For anyone stuck at an airport, railway station or port, Opening Gambit (2022) by British author Tilly Wallace might be a good choice. This is the first book in her Tournament of Shadows series and the sequel, A Dangerous Ruse, has already been published. If you enjoy these books you will also like the seven-volume Manners and Monsters series to which they are a prequel. That should keep you going however long the queue…

Opening Gambit is set in a version of 18th century Europe in which magic exists and a powerful Council of Mages forms part of the British government. There are only twelve mages at any one time and traditionally they have all been men. In the past, women born with magical powers were usually condemned as witches and executed. In these more enlightened times, a girl called Seraphina Winyard who was born a mage has been permitted to live. As a small child Sera was given into the care of the mage Lord Branvale. He has trained her to be his assistant but has always told her that she is a freak whose feeble powers are not worthy of a place on the Council of Mages.

The story begins in London in 1788 when Sera is fast approaching her eighteenth birthday. Knowing nothing about her real parents, Sera regards Lord Branvale’s servants as the closest thing she has to a family. She is also lucky enough to have two female friends – Lady Abigail, who visits to give Sera lessons in etiquette and deportment, and wealthy Kitty Napier who lives next door. Abigail encourages Sera to get married as soon as she is old enough to leave Branvale’s household but Kitty and her influential father have promised to help Sera achieve true independence.

As soon as they come of age, male mages are presented at court, given a title and a state-funded home, and – if they can pass a specific magical test – full access to the secrets of the Mages’ Tower. Sera fears that the Council of Mages is planning to keep her under Lord Branvale’s guardianship until she can be safely married off. It isn’t until she manages to remove a bracelet which Branvale put on her wrist when they first met that Sera realizes that her powers have been deliberately suppressed. Sera takes the initiative and goes to St James’s Palace with Kitty to present herself to King George and Queen Charlotte. When Lord Branvale tells the royal couple that Sera is a mere girl who should remain in his care for another ten years, she loses her temper and defeats her former mentor with a powerful display of magic. Only the intervention of Hugh Miles – a brilliant and innovative young surgeon – calms Sera before she causes a disaster. Volatile King George is impressed and acknowledges Sera as one of his mages.

Given the rank of a duchess, the young mage is now Lady Winyard but the Council of Mages tries to humiliate her by allocating her a small house in a poor part of London. Sera is unbothered by this and takes most of Lord Branvale’s servants with her to her new home. She settles in and cheerfully undertakes the unpleasant magical tasks set for her by the Council but Sera’s troubles are far from over. She soon learns that Lord Branvale has been murdered and that she is the main suspect. Can Sera clear her name by finding the real murderer and establish herself as a worthy member of the Council of Mages?

I make no apology for choosing another novel in which a young woman fights to be treated as an equal by the male establishment since this is still a huge issue for women in many parts of the modern world. Wallace is too much of a realist to let her heroine win a quick and easy victory. Lady Seraphina is still at odds with many of the Council of Mages in the Manners and Monsters books (2019-2022) which are set during the Regency Period after the French have made a particularly cruel magical attack on English society. That series is centred on Seraphina’s daughter, Hannah. Like all the children of mages, Hannah has no inherited magic but her unusual upbringing and education make her a valuable partner for an aristocratic investigator from the Ministry of Unnaturals. In both series each novel features a crime with supernatural elements, as well as advancing longer-term story arcs about the central characters including romances. So Wallace’s fictional world offers Mystery, Romance and Fantasy tinged with Horror as we are slowly introduced to the paranormal beings (Unnaturals) who lurk on the fringes of society. Be aware that Highland Wolves, a third sequence set in the same world, has considerably more in the way of sex scenes than the other two series.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Manners and Monsters books which manage to combine macabre plots with warm-hearted humour. I liked their gentle heroine but found her mother, the tragic but still formidable Lady Seraphina, to be the more interesting character. I was pleased to hear that Wallace was planning a series about the great mage’s early life, and curious to learn how Hannah’s devoted parents met, but I did wonder if I would find the books exciting since I already knew how Seraphina’s story ended.

I need not have worried. There was plenty to interest me in the personality of young Seraphina, which is very different from the sadder but wiser Lady Seraphina of Manners and Monsters. This Seraphina is not confident or serene. She is an obstinate and impulsive underdog who feels more at home among working class people than aristocrats. She has fighting spirit but her fiery temper only adds to her problems. Young Sera has a low opinion of men and marriage so at this stage in Tournament of Shadows it is hard to see how her destined husband will ever win her over. I look forward to finding out how he does it. His willingness to treat Sera as an intellectual equal will obviously be a major factor.

There are other intriguing mysteries surrounding Sera’s very existence. She yearns to find out about her true parents but there are both joyful and painful shocks in store for her when she does. Readers will wonder if Sera should trust her two best friends and the powerful men they are connected to. Someone has been determined to prevent Sera coming into her full powers. As the story unfolds, Lord Branvale’s role in this becomes increasingly ambiguous so there are hidden enemies to discover. The investigation of Branvale’s poisoning is a fascinating one, with Hugh Miles acting as an independent pathologist ahead of his era.

When Sera looks into Branvale’s professional and private life, she encounters supernatural beings such as vampires and banshees who live in fear of being exposed. Discovering that these Unnaturals have no civil rights and little protection from the law gives Sera another long-term cause to fight. She also learns that, however passionately she may feel about injustices and inequalities, she cannot change society instantly. Sera vows to start by making the small changes that are within her power. A timely lesson for all of us.

Sera pushes her new-found powers to the limit in Opening Gambit and what enviable powers they are. Wallace has created strict rules for the magic in her fictional version of European history. Britain only has twelve mages, the children of mages have no magic but their descendants may be endowed with specific powers. For example, Lady Abigail, the granddaughter of a mage, has music-magic which makes her an enchanting singer. Seraphina however can do almost anything for as long as her magical strength lasts. She has wonderfully inventive visual magic, creating images of a phoenix and a peacock to amuse the King and Queen and a shimmering, ever-changing meadow to illustrate Abigail’s singing. Her magic also has more practical uses. Sera can transform a plain gown by instantly adorning it with flowers or feathers, mend and dress a doll for a little girl and even remove a vast ball of fat which is blocking a London sewer. Did Merlin ever do anything as useful as that? The Council of Mages tries to punish Sera by sending her to perform humble tasks for farmers but she delights in finding ways to help them and discovers her deep affinity with a very female kind of earth-magic. Lady Seraphina is the fictional magician I would most like to be and I recommend all lovers of Fantasy fiction to make her acquaintance. Until next month…

Geraldine