Review: Margolyam, by Matthew Hughes
Margolyam
Matthew Hughes
320 pages
Release: August 5, 2024
ISBN 9781927880425
Publisher: Matthew Hughes
Matt Hughes is a Canadian writer with an impressive background: former staff speechwriter to two federal cabinet ministers in the 1970s, and a top-rated speechwriter for three decades in British Columbia. Along with that, he’s written 24 novels which have been under contract to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as sold over 100 works of short fiction to professional markets. I was pleased, in the 2010s, to be one of those publishers.
Matt has won the Arthur Ellis Award and Endeavour Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Prix Aurora, Locus, Nebula, and a sheaf of others.
To say Matt Hughes is comfortable with his craft would be stating the obvious.
His recent release, Margolyam, is a YA fantasy, set in a world familiar with magic and magicians.
The marketing blurb:
Orphaned at twelve, Margolyam leaves the port city of Golathreon to live with her aunt Oleadora, a sorceress and healer in the inland market town of Keddrick. But her new life brings out qualities in the girl that she never knew she possessed, and Margolyam begins a journey of self-discovery that will plunge her into the world of wizardry, with all its manifold wonders and dire perils.
This is very much a coming-of-age story, told in Matt’s comfortable, easy-to-read manner, and refreshingly done credibly from a young woman’s perspective. Margolyam, the main character, comes to realize she is what’s known as a tome-tickler, a rare form of sympathetic magic which plunges her into discovery of an ancient book in which an ancient wizard lives. The weight of that discovery, and the need to protect the tome and its captive, leads her on a journey across the continent, to a city populated primarily by renegade wizards. One sanctuary after another crumbles under the weight of political upheaval and feuding factions, leaving Margolyam facing difficult decisions and actions.
The plot hangs together very well, tumbling along at a good clip, although I found the characters a little stiff so that by the end of the novel, I really wanted to know more about Margolyam’s feelings and motivations. Mostly she allows herself to be shunted around, although perhaps that was a plot device to enhance her coming of age. The villains are pretty standard: narcissists, power-hungry, typical but identifiable and readable. If you’re looking for a complex novel, this isn’t it: simple, consumable, easy. While not the calibre of fantasy a reader expects from Naomi Novik or Premee Mohamed, Margolyam is an enjoyable summer read, despite the many copyediting oversights.