Darker Shade of Magic

Four parallel universes are layered on top of each other. All they have in common is there is a city upon a river called London. Everything else in the world diverged a long time ago when they were separated. Grey London is ours, dull and without magic. Red is resplendent and in balance. White was once all powerful, before Black London fell to the darkest of magics and White was used as a firebreak to stop the spread.

Kell, from Red London, is one of the few remaining magicians capable of traversing worlds. While he transports messages between the rulers of the 3 surviving cities, he also smuggles trinkets for those who would pay a great deal for anything from another world. But when he is tricked into smuggling something far more dangerous than he bargained for he ends up falling in with a thief & aspiring pirate of Grey London, Lila, to put things right.

It’s an interesting world and the stacked nature of the worlds and need for trinkets from each adds a decent limitation to Kell’s powers that everything makes sense and drives the plot forward. Nothing gets too silly when it comes to the uses of magic and the multiverse. I wish we had more of to round out the characters and each version of the city but it’s not significantly lacking given it’s part of a series; it lays a decent foundation there even if it could give more of a hook. I certainly enjoyed Lila. 

Phu,
I had issues with this book when i read it the first time, that's why i never picked up the second one afterwards. But on second readthrough, the issues became more hard to ignore.

This feels like an adult book, with YA characters. and that did not work for me at all. So many things in this book felt "meh" or just were "plot convenient". Especially the middle of the book had a ton of fillers, that were unnecessary and could have been removed. Just unnecessary blow up.
But if I would have liked the characters, i think i would not have cared, but for me the characters were so stereotype-y that i was very bored and felt they were very annoying? So, it really wasn't my case.

The good parts are the dane twins, and the bloody parts. I also loved the aesthetic of the world building and the magic. But it just wasn't enough?
It also did not mature well with time. A lot of things have been done so much better by now, that it just does not feel original anymore. And a lot of the tropes just became very bland over time.

It's a good book, if you have read YA and are now searching for books to get into adult fantasy. And it's a good book, if you like stylistic characters and like comic inspired characters. But if you look for something deeper and more fleshed out, this is not the book to go.