Cursed Balance of Magic Book 2
Fantasy, Gay Romance
Independent
Mar 23, 2022
Kindle
355
Amazon
Two friends. Two worlds. A selfish desire that threatens them both.
Raijin killed a witch and found himself cursed.
Sandro went to Raijin's aid and became an assassin's target.
Neither expected that they would trigger the biggest upheaval their world had seen in a thousand years.
And that it was the love between them that would lift the curse.
Cursed, the second book in the Balance of Magic series, is a slow-burn m/m fantasy romance featuring friends-to-lovers who become soulmates, irate death gods, curses, inept, narcissistic politicians, curious, compassionate witches, and a found family.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Talk about a slow burn!
I’m not sure why this series (two so far) appeals to me so much. In spite of the outlandish fantasy (magic and Otherworld and death gods), there is a kind of restraint in the story-telling that fits into the initial setting of Japan. Of course, another charm of the world Keswick creates is the idea that the magical Yuvine people—demon killers and savers of lost souls—are all over the world. It is this huge, ancient network of Yuvine hunters and seekers that forms the (someone shaky) cultural platform of the entire Balance of Magic series. There is politics, and where there’s politics, there’s trouble.
In “Cursed,” we get to know Raijin Yamakage, son of the highly skilled Yuvine hunter Rakurai Yamakage. We meet him in the early 1800s, and soon are introduced to Tenzen, a death god charged with rescuing the souls of the dead from demons and sending them on their way after nurturing them in his Otherworld garden.
Book two is even more extreme, in that not only do the characters move around the world a lot, but we move through a century of time, from 1901 to 2018. This is a reminder that the main characters all live for centuries, and thus see the world and human time differently from the humans whose souls they guard.
Raijin, who hasn’t seen his father in a while, decides to begin his service to the Custodia, the Yuvine central HQ, housed inside a cliff in Capri, Italy. At 100 years old, he is finally ready to take on the task of Hunter for the Yamakage clan. Upon arrival at the Custodia, he meets Sandro Lugano, the designated hunter for the Italian Lugano clan. Unlike Raijin, who was raised by a loving (if often absent) father, Sandro has lived most of his life at the Custodia, having been rejected by his clan after the death of his parents.
Now, Sandro immediately captures Raijin’s interest, and vice-versa. Given his name, I immediately thought of Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli, and all those beautiful paintings of men and women and angels with long auburn hair. Both young men are treated coldly by the commandant of the Custodia, so they by default become fast friends—and also a great hunter/seeker team, constantly on the move around the world to kill demons and save human souls. There is a particularly powerful chapter in which they are on the battlefield at Ypres during World War I—one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on earth. This moment of a magical fantasy world colliding with grim human reality is fantastic.
It takes these guys A CENTURY to realize that they’re more than friends. At 200 years old by the climax of the book, they are just hitting full young-adulthood in Yuvine terms. Raijin’s father is over 600 years old, and barely looks 30. Ah, so jealous.
Keswick adds all sorts of appropriate hurdles, each of which relates to the unexplained, rather sinister background machinations of the various clan leaders in the Yuvine world. Fighting demons, after all, is not without risk. Even by the end of the second book, while Raijin and Sandro see the truth in each other’s eyes, we still don’t fully know who or what is causing the problems in the invisible world of demons and human souls.
I guess that will remain until the third book appears. I’m hoping soon.