jacey | Booklog 100/2024: Benedict Jacka: An Inheritance of Magic

Narrated by Will Watt.

Stephen Oakwood is a young, talented but inexperienced drucrafter, living alone and scratching out a living as best he can in modern day London since his father disappeared three years earlier. Drucraft (magic) involves working with essentia and creating sigls which act like spells powered by the wielder's will. This is set against warring magical factions within magica\l families and unbeknownst to him, Stephen is an Ashford. Unfortunately he has huge gaps in his knowledge of the magical world, and this leads him to cross a couple of the younger Ashfords who begin a vicious feud. The book is a series of lessons and discoveries as Stephen struggles to strengthen his drucraft so that next time the Ashfords hit him, he won't be helpless. I enjoyed this though not having seen the word sigl in writing I thought 6the narrator was mispronouncing 'sigil'. It turns out that instead of 'si-jil' the word sigl rhymes with giggle. Which is a pity because it really niggled. (See what I did there?) Anyhow, the first book came to a reasonable stopping point, if not quite an ending, so I'm already listening to the second.