Angel Mage is a fantasy novel by Garth Nix, published 2019.
It's been a hundred and thirty seven years since the fall of the kingdom of Ystara, when most of the population died of a plague that turned their blood to ash and mutated a third into monsters. In the neighbouring country of Sarance, things are normal.
But then Liliath, the Maid of Ellanda, the most powerful angelic mage living and the one responsible, awakens from her magical sleep. She doesn't care much about the descendants of the Ystarans, known as Refusers because they can't use angelic magic or have it used on them without the same fate as the residents of their lost nation. She cares about a quartet of young Sarancians: Simeon, a studious doctor in training; Henri, an ambitious fortune hunter; Agnez, an adventurous musketeer cadet; and Dorotea, a student of icon-making and angelic magic. These four are the linchpin of her plans to be reunited with the archangel she considers her lover. And she doesn't care about the cost to anyone else...
Tropes:
- Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Technology lags behind in many areas, especially regarding health, because angelic magic is so useful. One of the reasons Refusers have such terrible lives is because all medicine is based around angelic magic, which can't be used on them. Notably, the highest technology is weapons technology, likely because it is very difficult to force an angel to kill someone.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: In the end, Liliah is united with Palleniel when she is turned into an angel and fused with them, becoming Palenieth. It's heavily implied that this means losing her free will and emotions.
- Beneath Notice: Refusers end up in menial positions as the underclass in Sarance. Which makes them perfect for spies as they are everywhere and everyone ignores them. Multiple times, a group of Refusers are blatantly spying and even the main characters notice something odd but dismiss it.
- Cassandra Truth: Dorotea figures out early on that there is a conspiracy involving angels. However, non of the other characters believe her and force her to keep quiet.
- Cast from Lifespan: The more powerful the angel being called upon, the more lifespan the mage has to give up. Liliath doesn't have to worry about this because she has consumed angels and can use them to power the magic instead.
- Child Prodigy/Teen Genius: Deconstructed. Liliath has prodigious skill and might be the most powerful mage ever. However, she's still only a teenager and lacks the wisdom to use her knowledge judiciously. For example, accidentally ripping apart Palleniel trying to summon him into a mortal.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Dorotea crosses this over with Ditzy Genius. She's always lost in her head, spacing out and thinks about nothing but icon-making and art. The other characters usually have to prod her to keep her on track.
- Decoy Protagonist: Lilliath is the POV character for the first few chapters but it's made clear that she's the villain. The actual protagonist is Dorotea who is the last of the main characters to be introduced.
- Didn't Think This Through: Agnez is Hotblooded and overly confident of her abilities which makes her act impulsively. She, a cadet, challenged the Captain of the Pursuivants to a deathmatch. The narration lampshades her "limited store of good sense"
- Distant Prologue: The prologue details the deaths of the last Cardinal of Ystara and her last living guard during the Doom of Ystara, a hundred and thirty seven years before the rest of the book.
- Dramatic Irony: On his way home after being promoted, Henri gets targeted by a Refuser cutpurse, only for a Refuser woman to stop the thief and return his belongings. The reader has already been informed of Liliath's orders for the four vessels of Palleniel's essence, of whom Henri is one, to be looked out for, but Henri assumes the fact that he's in the uniform of the servants of the Cardinal to be the reason why his purse was returned.
- Easily Forgiven: Dorotea quickly forgives Bisc and the rest of the Night Crew for working with Liliath, killing hundreds of people, kidnapping her and her friends, and almost causing another apocalypse. Of course, it's quickly pointed out that she doesn't have the legal authority to forgive them for anything, but she promises to put in a good word for them.
- Expy: Unsurprising, as the novel is heavily inspired by The Three Musketeers. Agnez bears more than a little similarity to D'Artagnan, being a Musketeer with a hot temper and three friends. Cardinal Duplessis is a Gender Flip of Cardinal Richelieu using the real-life cardinal's birth name; the captain of her Pursuivants is just a female Captain Rochefort.
- Fantastic Racism: The descendants of those who escaped Ystara and survived are now called Refusers because of how angelic magic doesn't work on them. Many are convinced that this is due to an act of unforgivable blasphemy by the people of Ystara when really they were just victims of Liliath's obsession with Palleniel. The Queen is seen as a moderate for allowing abe-bodied Refusers without a criminal record to work in the palace as pages and servants. The Cardinal wants them all wiped out. While the main characters are also descended from the Ystaran survivors, since they have the pure essence of Palleniel inside of themselves, they are able to use angelic magic without issue and their families integrated into Serancian society.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Sarance is France, Ystara is Spain, Alba is Britain and Menorco seems to be Morocco.
- Gender Is No Object: Gender discrimination doesn't seem to exist in this world. In fact, all the Cardinals seen are women, and in Sarance, the ruling monarch is always a Queen, with the King expected by tradition to ineffectually scheme for power.
- God-Eating: Liliath consumed several lesser angels in order to make herself more than human and able to ignore the usual cost of using angelic magic.
- God's Hands Are Tied: Angels cannot act outside their scope (though that is malleable), are bound to answer their icons and have limited ability to resist a human's orders.
- Light Is Not Good: Lilliath wields the power of angels to commit mass genocide.
- Homage: To The Three Musketeers. The book is in fact dedicated to Alexandre Dumas.
- Interservice Rivalry: The Cardinal's Pursuivant, Queen's Musketeers, King's Guards and the City Watch do not get along.
- It's All About Me: Liliath doesn't care about anything other than her goal to be somehow reunited with Palleniel, who she considers her lover. Dorotea realizes that the problem is that she's too young and too powerful; she never had anyone who could tell her "no."
- Kill and Replace: Liliath arranges the murder of an exiled Alban noblewoman named Lady Dehiems in order to take her place at the Sarancian court.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Cardinal Alsysheron in the prologue, killed by a beastling that climbs up behind her while she's talking to Ilgran about Liliath's potential motives.
- Mystical Plague: The Ash Blood plague that destroyed Ystara, which killed two-thirds and turned the rest into monsters.
- Our Angels Are Different: They are limited in power geographically, with each nation having a host, and can only affect the mortal world by the will of a mage.
- Pieces of God: The Refusers are affected by angelic magic the way they are because each of them has a tiny fragment of Palleniel inside of them, making Liliath the only one capable of using magic on them safely in their current state. The four young Sarancians Liliath is targeting contain the archangel's pure essence, which is why they're crucial to her plans.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: Liliath consuming angels is shown to be utterly horrifying, akin to destroying an innocent sentient. Many are afraid of her and beg, pled and fight as she consumes them.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Liliath might be a frighteningly powerful mage but she's ultimately a spoiled teenager. She throws tantrums when she doesn't get her way, complains when her surroundings aren't luxurious and only thinks about herself and her goals.
- Red Baron: Liliath as the Maid of Ellanda.
- Skewed Priorities: Even when it becomes clear that there is a conspiracy and their lives are in danger, almost all the main characters end up distracted by other concerns. In one scene Dorotea is looking for her friends in order to discuss an important discovery but Simeon is performing surgery, Agnez is playing dice and Henri is looking over a clerk.
- Stars Are Souls: The stars in the sky symbolize the angels and what they're doing, and shift depending on what country the sky is being viewed from.
- Tears of Joy: We see this reaction at the end of the book in an Ystaran who's been a Beastling presumably for the past 137 years, after she's been returned to normal.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Angels do not kill of their own free will. There are no Angels who scope is directly fighting or killing and Angels have to be compelled to take a life.
- Was Once a Man: The beastlings transformed by the Ash Blood plague. At the end, Dorotea wonders if the angels were once human as well, since it would explain where they came from in the first place.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Bisc turns out to be this. He only joined the Night Crew because he had no other options aside from living on the streets and begging. We only see him kill innocent people when he's under the impression that this will ultimately help restore the Refusers' ability to use Angelic magic and the kingdom of Ystara.
- Younger Than They Look: Thanks to drawing on their lifespans to summon angels, powerful angelic mages normally look a couple decades older than they actually are.
