Wizardness

Affiliate Link: https://bookshop.org/a/110384/9781982141172

This book is pretty solid. It uses the underdog goes to the top academy for magic users/leaders/etc… trope that’s been pretty popular for a while. I get why it’s popular, I used it in my Good God Damn series. It’s a way to incrementally introduce both the readers and the characters to the world. The stakes can be kept generally low, but the tension and interpersonal drama can make them feel much greater than they actually are. They build up the relationships for later in the series, where those interpersonal relationships are drawn upon and become critical for the success of our heroes.
Some of the books that immediately came to mind when I read this were Red Rising, Locked Tomb, Poppy Wars, The Traitor Baru Comormorant, Lightbringer, just to name a few. That really does put this book in a good group. Unlike the Poppy Wars or Locked Tomb, there’s no enemies to lovers trope, but there’s definitely antagonist to good friend trope. Which is fairly normal in these sorts of books. I definitely liked the Will of the Many’s implementation of this storyline.
The world is interesting. It’s very roman, which seems very much of our time, where people are constantly talking about rome. It feels like it’s a fantasy world set in Rome rather than the middle ages, which is a definitely nice change from the norm there.
The magic system is unique as well. It reminds me of the David Farland series, Runelords. If you haven’t read that series, the first book is definitely well worth the read. It’s an interesting magic system. In Runelords, the main characters use brands with specific Runes to transfer some capability from one person to another. They can give up sight, strength, constitution, grace, etc… The person getting the power gets everything that person gave up. They become stronger faster, etc… The main character initially abhors the whole idea of Runes, but because of circumstances eventually decides to use the power. This is a pretty common trope as well.
Which is also seen in Will of the Many. The main character Vis, does not want to cede his Will to anyone else. He fights it and is literally punished for it. Giving up will saps your strength, your energy, and will to do much of anything. People still work, but they are slower about it and seem sort of depressed. The people at the bottom are Octavii, basically serfs. The level of above them, Septmii have a number of Octavii’s will ceded to them. They then cede half that to the Sextus above them, and so on. This makes people above incredibly powerful.
Like those books I mentioned above with the School trope, there’s also the outsider trying to change the system trope going on here. I think it’s closest to The Traiter Baru Cormorant, since she’s explicitly trying to bring down the clear stand in for the US as we’re taking over the stand in for the pacific islands. In this book, though, Rome has already concurred and fully dominated Suus, were our protagonist is from.

I’ve called out a lot of tropes here. Do I think that all these tropes are bad? No. I have clearly read a lot of these books. I hadn’t really put together how many I’d read until I started to write this review. It’s a pretty common thing. I expect that if we dig deeper there’s more, I’m sure we could toss Wizard of Earthsea on that list. The real question is, what’s unique about this book compared to all those other books using the same trope.
One unique thing is the class structure. Typically the characters are tossed into one big class or group and then shuffled between different teachers. Very highschool like. In this book, the classes are structured in a Heirarchy, which models their society as a whole. There’s class 7 through class 3, which is generally the top most people have any chance of getting to. The inequities of the system of a whole is written into this class structure. The teachers dictate who gets to move up and it can entirely depend on if that teacher likes you, rather than how good you are. Which is a pure reflection of class in both the book and the realworld.
While the world is Roman, the problems plaguing The Hierarchy Republic (The name of the dominate world order) are clearly based on our capitalist world today. Driven by greed and selfishness.
In terms of the accuracy of the Roman-ness, I honestly haven’t read enough Roman history to know how accurate it is, but it feels close enough to pass a sniff test the same way most fantasy can pass a sniff test at being middle ages. It’s far from perfect, has plenty of artistic liberties and generally is just set dressing for a return to physical strength being of critical importance, which isn’t really there as much in our current society (outside of sports).

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I don’t think it should be in the top 50 fantasy books of all time, like the r/fantasy poll believed. It was refreshing to see something like this get published, but it generally felt very comfortable. So if you like micro-genres this book probably checks a bunch of those boxes.