Review of The Outcast Mage by Annabel Campbell

One of the unwritten fantasy novels in rattling around in my brain involves a society where people without magic face discrimination and fear. It’s not an original idea, definitely been done before, and it will be done again. So to see Annabel Campbell use this trope in The Outcast Mage is both reassuring and enjoyable! Part bildungsroman, part political thriller, Campbell’s debut isn’t pitch perfect—but it’s got some good moves. Thanks to publisher Orbit and NetGalley for the eARC.

Naila is a mage in training—except she might not be. A mage, that is. She might be a “hollow,” a pejorative term for someone who isn’t a mage. In Amoria, the city of her birth, mages and non-mages live in tenuous detente—one that a hawkish mage is threatening to upset. Naila is almost expelled from wizard school, but Haelius—a hollow-born wizard, and Amoria’s most powerful mage in generations—intervenes and undertakes to teach her personally. As Naila struggles to learn even the most basic magic, sinister events conspire to discredit Haelius, cast Naila out of Amoria, and destabilize not just the city’s political structure but its physical structure as well. This city of glass just might shatter.

The world of The Outcast Mage is exciting and lush. I love the dynamics Campbell has created, with mages versus non-mages, and of course within the ranks of the mages we have the mage-born and the hollow-born. Beyond Amoria are hints of a vaster world full of kingdoms and empires on the up or down. Campbell expertly finds that balance between essential exposition and avoiding too much infodumping. As a result, I was pretty hooked on the magic system, the lore—all that worldbuilding.

Alas, I was less invested in the characters. Naila is … fine. Haelius is … fine. Larinne is … fine? The conflicts are pretty good—I enjoy the gradual teacher–student trust building between Haelius and Naila, as well as Larinne’s conflict with her sister. Ultimately, however, I just had a hard time getting excited by any of these characters’ journeys. Even Naila, who arguably has the most growth in the story and eventually sets off on a very epic quest of sorts, never fully embodies the kind of protagonist I need. It isn’t about action per se—all these characters have a decent amount of agency and the ability to make grievous mistakes. But it is about impact. None of the characters ever does something that makes me go, “Whoa!” and notice their growth.

Aspects of the plot of The Outcast Mage feel super timely for 2025. This is a story about rising fascism, complete with secret police and brownshirt thugs and politicians like Larinne who have to wrestle with the temptation to comply in advance. Sound familiar? I couldn’t help but project a lot of my anxieties onto this book and feel vaguely uplifted by the motifs of resistance Campbell infuses into each page. This is a book that champions mutual aid, resistance in many forms, and the need for intersectional and intergeneration allies.

Yet the story just takes forever to get going. Not only was I impatient for the penny to finally drop on Naila’s magic sitch (which is totally on me), but I needed the political situation to develop more rapidly than it did. The minutiae, the endless scenes going back and forth between different settings as we learn about how much people hate Naila or Haelius or whatever … I don’t know. There’s a rock-and-roll arrangement of this story that punches up the pacing while keeping the essential melody, and I would love to hear it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have a hefty respect for The Outcast Mage. This is a great debut novel: Campbell is clearly both a creative storyteller and an ambitious one. Yet I’m not waiting on the edge of my seat for the sequel the way I’d like to be. Hey, that was how I felt with Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne and here we are three years later with me proclaiming its trilogy conclusion as one of the best fantasy novels I read in 2024. So maybe The Outcast Mage is on a similar trajectory? Only time will tell. For now, this is a novel with both flaws and flair, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which facets are which.