True, he has a bit of a hero’s arc in A Darker Shade of Magic: leave home, learn to master his extended power as an Antari, take up the quest of returning the shard of Black London to its home, defeat the rulers of White London, send Holland and the shard through to Black London, and return to Red London.īut as A Gathering of Shadows unfolds, his hero’s arc is over, and he’s given an expanded version of a role many lady characters are often shoved into: the caretaker, the worrier, the person who must balance everything while the hero runs forward with a dagger and a grin. Kell, as powerful as he is, isn’t the hero of this series.

The hero’s journey, in their lovely world of classic sci-fi and fantasy, is reserved for the leading male character. And look, I sort of get why some elitist speculative fiction fans might wrinkle their noses. The blurb is from his perspective we start the story in his point-of-view it’s his world that we’re living in. That Lila is our hero comes at a sort of crossroads as to how the story is told to us. Instead, Schwab writes Lila Bard as something Lila may never have expected herself to become: a goddamn hero. She could have relegated Lila to the role of damsel-in-distress (not that Lila would have ever allowed such a thing), or had her act as the scrappy sidekick who always comes through. Schwab could have easily set up Kell to take those moments, written a story about Kell discovering his powers, about Kell saving the day, about Kell’s bildungsroman. That Lila Bard gets the plot arc and story moments most often associated with the male heroes of traditional fantasy stories can’t be an accident on Schwab’s part. Our hero in Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy is not Kell. The hero “seizes the sword,” so to speak, and rises to whatever challenges face them when they’re least expecting it. The hero realizes they must learn to master whatever power they’ve been gifted. The hero crosses into this new world and begins some sort of quest.

Everybody who reads this site is probably intimately familiar with the hero’s journey, but for the sake of my sanity, we’ll break it down into its main arcs: hero leaves home at the suggestion of or with the help of a mentor.

The shades of magic series