The Battlemage, by Taran Matharu | Book Review #406

The Battlemage is the 3rd book in the Summoner trilogy.

This review contains spoilers.

The Wyvern turned, its eyes focused on Fletcher, and he suddenly realized how puny his sword was against the monstrosity before him. He backed away slowly. His knees trembled with exhaustion, barely able to bear his weight. He could hardly stand, let alone run.

Fletcher and his classmates from Vocans Academy—including the elf Sylva and the dwarf Othello—travel through the ether, where they must pursue a mortally dangerous quest to rebuild their world and broker peace.

As he leads a small army of soldiers, Fletcher will face his biggest challenge yet: his nemesis, the albino orc, Khan, who seeks to destroy everything Fletcher loves.

With how the last book ended, I was itching to read The Battlemage. Yet I knew that I didn’t want to read The Battlemage right away because I wanted the Summoner books to stay separate in my mind. Does that make sense? Well, it does to me!

What I definitely liked about the start of this novel was that the story started pretty much where the last book ended. I enjoyed the fact that we, the reader, jump right into things immediately. I like that the story started off where the last book ended, though I had a touch of a hard time remembering who was who for the first few chapters.

What else I enjoyed from The Battlemage was:

How we saw Ignatius grow and evolve.
The action! There’s actually quite a bit of it in The Battlemage and it was something that was kind of unexpected (because I didn’t read the synopsis prior to reading the story). Taran Matharu sure knows how to write action scenes though!
The characters Crack Me Up.

There’s so much packed into The Battlemage. Seriously. All the action aside, there were turns in the book that I didn’t see coming at all. Who Fletcher was at the beginning of The Battlemage versus the end of the end of The Battlemage are almost completely different. I for sure did not see the ending of The Battlemage play out as it did.

The one thing that surprised me in this story was all the deaths that happened

There are quite a bit of defeats and triumphs that happen within The Battlemage that surely shape who Fletcher was at the end of the story and honestly, it was a pleasure to read and see Fletcher and his friends grow into who they are at the end of the book.

With that said though, there are so many deaths in this book!! And boiiiiii, Fletcher never seems to get a break, does he?!

Overall there is much is packed into The Battlemage, it’s kind of hard to believe that everything that happened, actually happened. But it did, and some—most, actually was a fight and there were loses. There were so many deaths in this novel. Not major character deaths, but deaths that affected Fletcher. Yet there were still a few times here and there where the story had me laughing.

The ending was very bittersweet.

I give The Battlemage 3.5 stars.

Happy Reading!
–Adele