REVIEW: Mark of the Fool (#1)
The best part of reading this wasn’t the book itself. It wasn’t the setting, it wasn’t the characters, and it definitely wasn’t the plot.
It was the audio, narrated by Travis Baldtree.
If you know LitRPG and progression fantasy, you know his name — the man behind the narration for the Cradle series, Primal Hunter, even Beware of Chicken??
I only know him from Cradle, but I didn’t get the audiobook, so I never heard his voice. I don’t usually listen to any audiobooks, before I listened to Against the World up to publication, so switching between listening and reading digitally was a new experience.
And that experience was the best part of reading this.
AMAZING AUDIOBOOK, …OKAY BOOK?
Mark of the Fool had a really good start. The entire premise is that the main character is burdened with the worst of a set of prophesied abilities: the Mark of the Fool (titlecard). To be specific, if he tries anything combat or magic oriented, he’s mentally flashbanged with every time that he failed at it, while everything else is fair game, and the Mark shows him every time that he did that thing right, and how to improve.
With that, and with him being prophesied as the hero’s helper and sacrificial lamb, Alex says fuck that and leaves home with his sister and best friend to pursue his own goal of becoming a wizard, no matter what. Alex picks what he wants, not what the prophecy says he should want.
And honestly? This was great. That limitation is great. I loved the setup, and I could only tell you about the Mark so specifically because figuring it out to that depth is an entire plot point! Alex spends time learning about how the Mark interferes or helps him, and what it chooses to affect, and how, in some cases, he can still use it for the better.
Like magic.
Reaching and attending the wizard university is a central goal that I’ll come back to, but it raises the immediate question — if the protag gets flashbanged as soon as he tries to do magic, how can he become a wizard?
BY FOOLING AROUND ANYWAY.
The Mark shows Alex everything he ever did wrong anytime he tried a spell, so Alex realizes he can use those to understand what not to do and try something different. This is genius, and it was so different from how I expected the Mark would affect his wizard-casting.
As such, it made the first arc, where the gang delved into a cave overtaken by monsters and teleportation magic, super gripping and fun to read, especially considering how the book handles plotting action sequences.
PUT THE FOOL IN THE WORST SITUATION
What if you take your main characters, put them in the worst possible situations, and just tell them to figure it out? Mark of The Fool asks this question and shows us the answer constantly. In one chapter, the protagonists find a massive stone door protected by statues that laser anything that steps on the wrong tile. Droves of insects are on their heels, forcing them to pick a direction.
And so Alex uses his singular spell, summoning a floating ball, to trigger the tiles and direct the statues at the insects, before directing the statues at each other, taking the gems that give them their lasers. Then, once they’re up against the hive queen, invincible to their attacks and able to kill them in an instant, Alex uses those gems as powerful bombs to kill her.
This arc was so epic, and the hints at Alex being able to control the cores of the dungeon and how that interacted with the Fools of the past were such an interesting question to keep in the back of our minds. The following arc on a boat was amazing, too, yet I was constantly looking forward to seeing where my unanswered questions would go.
What’s up with the previous Fools and controlling mana cores?
Is the prophecy really true?
When will the creature the Ravener sent after Alex show up?
Will Selena actually do anything outside of cry and call Alex’s name?
That last one was a joke. We love Selena.
But we don’t love…
THE FOOL LOST HIS STEAM
When they reached the magic school, I at least enjoyed how relatable it was.
I’m going into my third year in college.
I’m used to magic school settings and schools in fiction typically taking most of the inspiration from high school and below, but here in Mark of the Fool, it’s a magic university. There’s orientation, there’s financial aid, we watch him plan out his living conditions, he has to keep an exercise regime going outside of his classes, they go out on the town — there’s so much more they can do, being in university, and it felt so different for me to relate to some of it.
But the pacing dropped.
Every question I just listed, each of the major threads of the plot — none of them are answered or progressed by the end of the first book. Hell, the most we got was confirmation that Selena will do more, by the reveal at the end, but…past that?
The plot never spun back to the hype of the Ravener’s creature apparently pursuing Alex. We got magic school stuff, we followed him through almost every class, he learned a few lessons, and then the book ended. There was no climax built up, no encapsulating moment to finish off the story, nothing.
Here, it’s worth acknowledging that MoTF wasn’t a book. It was a Royal Road series, packaged into a novel, and with every slice-of-life chapter that didn’t progress the plot much, I felt it. Others might be into that magic slice of life and reading chapters upon chapters of just living a day in this magical world, and if you do, I recommend it! Others might be into how purely progression-focused this book was!
However, I was glad when it ended, because it left me craving something with a more substantial plot. I hoped that all the slice-of-life was leading to something big, but…no. Character-wise, they were good enough. My taste might’ve been too high from finishing Words of Radiance, but I saw Selina’s twist coming from a mile away, and past her, I couldn’t tell you what the characters’ emotional arcs were.
These fools didn’t have any!
Besides becoming better and more capable, they didn’t have much in terms of emotional arcs. Cradle was the same, but Cradle was also an underdog power fantasy, and Lindon constantly had his moments of taking revenge and usurping those who thought him weak. MOTF has none of that, yet, because the credits roll, and the cool parts are sandwiched between layers of slice of life.
If you want that, I recommend it! If not, don’t let the beginning fool you. I still think it’s a solid book, and I got all the plot I needed with my next read.