meganbmoore | Stranger at the Wedding by Barbara Hambly (Reply)

Kyra is a young journeyman wizard about to take her final tests before her Council. However, something is affecting her magic in unusual ways, culminating in a vision of her younger sister, Alix, dying on her wedding night. Not about to let such a thing happen, Kyra leaves the Citadel and returns home in the midst of the wedding preparations, despite having been exiled by her father six years before.

The book is set in the same world as The Silicon Mage, The Silent Tower and The Dog Wizard, but has little connection to them. I think Kyra was mentioned as Random Young Wizard #3 or something in The Dog Wizard, but the storylines of the first three have virtually no impact on Stranger at the Wedding. Instead, the book focuses on Kyra’s attempts to both save and reconnect with her family, even as she does everything in her power to sabotage and postpone Alix’s wedding to fend off the vision, and on her background.

The book is darker than the other books in the series, touching on themes that were mentioned as a part of Antryg’s past before, but never as directly addressed, and deals almost entirely with the non-wizard society of the world, which we haven’t seen a lot of before. Though the final reveals about Kyra’s past are difficult to read, I thought it was very interesting to see how Kyra and her father got to where he blamed her for almost destroying the family. In the end, I can’t approve of how he treated her, but I can understand how he came to be like that. But I almost always like focus on family in fiction, and I like that the plot revolved around Kyra being determined to save her sister by any means necessary. I also really liked her various adventures and intrigues as she tried to figure out what was behind the danger to Alix, and the romance was cute, despite being a trope I’m not a huge fan of.