Minimum Wage Magic by Rachel AaronMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jacket Blurb: The DFZ, the metropolis formerly known as Detroit, is the world’s most magical city with a population of nine million and zero public safety laws. That’s a lot of mages, cybernetically enhanced chrome heads, and mythical beasties who die, get into debt, and otherwise fail to pay their rent. When they can’t pay their bills, their stuff gets sold to the highest bidder to cover the tab.
That’s when they call me. My name is Opal Yong-ae, and I’m a Cleaner: a freelance mage with an art history degree who’s employed by the DFZ to sort through the mountains of magical junk people leave behind. It’s not a pretty job, or a safe one—there’s a reason I wear bite-proof gloves—but when you’re deep in debt in a lawless city where gods are real, dragons are traffic hazards, and buildings move around on their own, you don’t get to be picky about where your money comes from. You just have to make it work, even when the only thing of value in your latest repossessed apartment is the dead body of the mage who used to live there.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This is the first in a new series set in the same universe as my Heartstrikers books, but you don’t need to have read those stories to enjoy this one. MINIMUM WAGE MAGIC was written to stand by itself, so if you haven’t read the others, don’t worry! I wrote this book with you in mind. I hope you’ll give it a try, and thank you so much for reading!
Round up to 3.5 stars.
Read as an audio book
This is set in the same universe as the Heartstriker series by the same author, but placed after the events in Book 3 from what I can ascertain. I've reviewed the first three Heartstriker books previously on Goodreads and this blog, I enjoyed those with some caveats, and thought I'd give this one a try.
I think I enjoyed this a tich more, only because the info dumps were small. Oh, so much less info dumping! This isn't to say our main character Ms Opal doesn't ramble on, she does, it's just much less than Julius Heartstriker.
As with the authors other books, our main character - Opal Yong-ae - has gotten herself into a pickle and her back against the wall. She's in dire straights financially and has until the end of the week to come up with the money she owes her controlling father. The harder she tries to dig herself out of the situation, the worse things get.
I'll start with aspects that I didn't care for - the repetitive commentary. As I noted above, nothing like the Heartstriker series, but still enough for me to go Ho-hum more than once. This was especially notable during "intense" events, when Opal was convinced she was about to die - then cue the internal monologue and wait for ten minutes for the conflict resolution. The astute reader will easily pick up on Opal's string of bad luck and figure out why, a bit of a gimme and could have been handled more deftly. From a audio narration standpoint - Sybil's "voice" was just grating and I had hard time believing a Companion AI could even behave in such a manner. The whole Sybil aspect didn't work for me, actually.
What I enjoyed was the freshness of this story line - a different take on this alternate reality where magic has returned and dragons and spirits rule. There were some interesting twists thrown in to keep me engaged in Opal's adventures. The ending was predictable - this really could only end one way - but, a delightful resolution to Opal's situation really made listening to this a treat. Overall, this was light, the plot was interesting, and delightfully different.
Recommended if you enjoyed the Heartstriker series. Recommended if you want to try a new urban fantasy/alternate reality fantasy.
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