Minimum Wage Magic

Being a cleaner may not be the most glamorous job, but Opal loves going through abandoned properties and searching for items to sell. Although lately she’s been down on her luck, scrounging for anything to help her dwindling bank account. When her latest property comes with a body included, Opal knows she should just walk away. But something tells her the deceased owner may be hiding something worth a lot of money. After all, not every person uses unique magical markings to protect their house. But as she digs deeper into the truth, another interested party surfaces. One willing to do anything to claim what’s hidden.

The world of Minimum Wage Magic is fascinating. The Detroit Free Zone, otherwise known as DFZ, is a living city. Filled with its own magic, it also has a soul. GPS is a must in DFZ as at any point the city can decide to move the buildings around and grow new ones! Rachel Aaron did a great job capturing the life of the city and its personality through the eyes of the characters. While it isn’t exactly sentient, it certainly has its own opinions.

Minimum Wage Magic leans on the sleuthing side as Opal searches for clues to what she hopes will be her next big score. There’s some action to keep the plot moving, but for the most part, it deals with character interactions and building the world of DFZ. A personal mystery is layered into the main plot as well, slowly revealing who Opal is and to who she owes money. This adds a nice level of tension throughout the story as Opal has a set due date for her next loan payment.

Opal and her AI Sybil are quite the team as they investigate. Programmed to keep her well-being in mind, Sybil is the constant reminder to do the safe thing. However, as readers will soon find out, through the hilarious back and forth dialogue between the two, Opal doesn’t always listen to the safe choice. And Sybil has quite the personality built into her allowing her to voice opinions on Opal’s actions.

The one downside I found to the story was the romantic tension. Opal being fully invested in her goal was oblivious most of the time. And the character who was interested in Opal wasn’t the best at voicing their feelings. While this fit with their personalities, when the story began to draw the romantic interest into focus, it didn’t quite fit in. I do hope to see what develops between the two as the story continues.

I will say though, being a Shadowrun player, the number of Easter eggs in Minimum Wage Mage made my role-playing heart sing. From the political and corporate overload dragons to the verbiage and slang used. I loved being able to view a world I’ve been immersed in as a player come to life in a completely new way.

This is marketed as a spin-off series, but have no fear, you can read Minimum Wage Magic without any of the other books. If you're a fan of urban fantasies and a science fantasy world, give it a try.

This is the first novel of a trilogy, but the trilogy is written as one continuous story: I think you have to be ready to read the whole thing. Each novel is a fairly normal size for a novel; the whole trilogy is shorter than [b:The Lord of the Rings 33 The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566425108l/33.SX50.jpg 3462456], but longer than most other long novels.On the good side, the story is competently put together, I found it entertaining and quite gripping, and the characters are congenial enough, though not completely plausible.The scenario is imaginative but gaudy, and didn't strike me as plausible. I've read fantasy set in the modern world before, and it can work well, but I think this is overdoing it. It's set in a future in which magic, powerful dragons, and multiple powerful gods have all appeared, and we also have advanced computer technology coexisting with it.The dragons and the gods aren't particularly human-friendly, on the whole, and can be actively hostile. The city of Detroit is wiped out by one god and then rebuilt by another god. Dragons eat humans if they feel like it.It seems to me that all this going on would have a disruptive and damaging effect on human organized activities in general, and on the human economy in particular. In that sort of environment, I think it would be hard even to maintain steady production of computer equipment, and harder to advance the state of the art. So the advanced computer technology described in these books strikes me as implausible: I doubt that the damaged world economy would be able to research, develop, and produce such technology.Even without the computer technology, there are simply too many powerful entities in this story for my liking. It's inelegant and feels a bit childish. “Dragons are great, let's have ten of them! With names!”Overall, this seems to me what's called a young-adult book these days: not quite a children's book, although I suppose children could read it; but a book aimed at people in their teens and early twenties. The heroine, Opal Yong-ae, says that she's 26, but from her lifestyle and behaviour I'd have guessed some years younger.Regarding the structure of the story, each book gives Opal a task that seems completely impossible, but we know that she's going to accomplish it somehow (if she didn't, the story would be pointless and depressing). I find this rather irritating; the author is overdoing it again. Please, just give her a difficult task; we don't need impossible.Despite my various criticisms, I've quite enjoyed the whole trilogy, but at this stage I don't know how much I'll want to reread it in future. If I find myself rereading it regularly, I'll increase my rating. Three stars is what I give to books that I may well reread sometime, but not often.

So here is the thing about Rachel Aaron. I feel like something is missing of most of her books. They are not bad or anything, but they are mostly not amazing quality and really put together. This was another example of that.

Opal basically does the storage auction version of flats in this futuristic and magical, lawless version of Detroit. She gets the place on an auction, cleans it out and the stuff in it is hers to sell. She used to be a rich girl of some sort, but in exchange for freedom she has a huge debt to pay too her dad, which means her recent horrible luck with finding juicy stuff is really bad news.
Then one day she finds a place with a dead body and she figures out the person was doing something dangerous. She needs to find out, as something that dangerous can potentially mean big money.

One thing I have to warn you about. The story of the book ends at around 85% of the book and the rest is basically just sample chapters of other stuff from the author. I mean I can't blame her for the hustle, really, but at the same time this is already a very short little book. Depending on the price you pay for it, it is something you should consider and also the reading experience can be different depending on if you know the book is going to end soon or not.
I personally don't like sample chapters neither from the next book in the series nor something completely different. Just in general I hate reading parts of a book I don't have access to right now in full form, because either I'm wasting time or I will like it and want to read it, in which case I'm shit out of luck. I'm probably not the only person with limited access to whatever I need right away. So there is that. So from my point of view this feature of the book sucked.

The thing is, Opal never becomes too interesting. She is fine, nothing offensively wrong with her, but like with the book, she is kind of just there. A tiny bit of “she believes she is ugly, but guys just love her because she is pretty after all” is present which is the overused trope of almost any kind of YA type book. She was made to believe she is ugly for a reason, but still.
Of course she needs a love interest, who is a walking trope again, namely the rough guy who seems like a total dick but deep down is such a nice, down on his luck heart of gold man with some sort of a dark past. Nik, you so original.

The story itself is fine, it's fast paced and kind of fun. Is it polished or ingenious? No. Did I get very excited about it? Nah. I'm not sure how much more it will become. Of course we will hear more about Nik's past and also the overarching story with Opal and her family for sure, but at the same time I'm nowhere near invested enough to care all that much.
It plays out in the same world as a previous series about dragons but that one seemed to be much richer and there were many more characters, so while the protagonists had their limitations we had many others with their motivations and scheming to make things a bit more interesting and push even the goody-two-shoes mains to do something interesting. This book would benefit from Amelia or Bob from those books fucking shit up for everyone. Just saying.

Overall just not a horribly exciting book. Serviceable, something quick you can read while you don't have much time or you are distracted by other things (hello, vacation time reading), but not something that got me too too excited.

Have a nice day and do more than the bare minimum!