Spellbreaker by Charlie N. HolmbergMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Enter a wonderful new world of magic where wizards don't create new spells, merely pay for old spells to be written on their bodies and absorbed. When wizards die all the spells they accumulated over their lifetime are somehow downloaded into a spellbook which their bodies leave behind.
Elsie Camden was abandoned by her family when she was only seven. Brought up in the workhouse, she then became employed as a maid and then a general assistant to the stonemason Ogden.
Elsie has a secret, she is an unregistered spellbreaker, she can sense spells and break them (she sees them as intricate knots which she can unravel). She has been working secretly for a group she calls the Cowls (because the only one she met hid their face under a cowl), breaking spells which oppress working people. The mysterious Cowls communicate with Elsie by leaving letters for her with instruction as to which spells to break.
However, when Elsie travels to Seven Oaks in Kent to break a spell which the Duke of Kent has placed on the servants' quarters to prevent them from escaping, she is caught by one of the Duke's guests, a powerful wizard called Bacchus Kelsey, visiting London from his home in Barbados to receive his master status from the academy and hopefully receive a spell. Bacchus agrees not to report Elsie if she agrees to help him both break old, weak spells around the Duke's home so that he can replace them with stronger spells, and also lift a curse which has affected the crops in the surrounding fields.
Meanwhile, there has been a spate of murders of wizards and thefts of their spellbooks. While Elsie can't help feeling that these are rich people problems, when Ogden is attacked in their home she worries that no-one is safe. But who is doing this ... and why?
Loved this and can't wait to read the next one.
Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.
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