The Zero Blessing – Christopher G. Nuttall

Well-crafted YA-style fantasy about a girl with no magic (in a world where everyone has some) who is sent to an elite magic-academy boarding school. One of her dorm-mates is a Capulet (their families are rivals for influence or position at court) who picks on her - something more serious when it the bully can turn her into a frog and she can’t defend or retaliate. The protagonist herself in interesting and engaging - and of course there is something special about her, or the book would have been short. As it was, the book was not short, but I read it in one sitting.

The read was enjoyable, but it fell in the literary-junk-food category. The school is embedded within a completely-generic medievaloid society. The plot is driven by heavy-handed plot devices (the heaviest being the protagonist’s admission into the school). The school and the magic borrow heavily from the author’s much-better book “Schooled in Magic”, but are not-nearly-as-well fleshed out. (The author himself identifies SiM as Zero-Blessing’s birthplace.) The SiM borrowings may have been a disadvantage, as they enabled the author to dash this book off without worrying enough about the scaffolding.

If you haven’t read the author’s “Schooled in Magic”, read that instead. If you have, consider this book a spin-off.