For Stephen Oakwood, Drucraft is very much a real thing, but he isn't rich, and the only way to really get good at it seems to involve expensive schools. Stephen's mother left when he was young, and his father disappeared about three years ago, claiming someone was after him. While Stephen learned about Drucraft from his father, he only has the faintest idea of what he is doing. Unfortunately, Stephen doesn't have much time to practice his craft since he is stuck in the daily grind of earning a wage just to keep him and his cat, Hobbes, sheltered and fed.
Stephen's life takes a sudden change when a young woman named Lucella Ashford calls on him. According to Lucella, he has some unexpected ties to House Ashford, a powerful magical family, and for some reason, she feels threatened by Stephen as a possible heir to the Head of House title. The resulting conflict throws Stephen into a world that he was only aware of on the periphery. While it's clear that the current Ashford patriarch, Charles Ashford, has no intention of ever naming Stephen his heir (despite whatever connection Stephen's mother seems to have with the family), Charles does give Stephen some hush money to keep him placated.
While the couple of thousand pounds that Charles throws at Stephen is a pittance to the older man, Stephen seizes the windfall as a chance to quit living just to survive and actually focus on his magic. He might even figure out a way to make a living off of it instead of the random jobs he's been able to hold so far.
At first, Stephen is happy to leave the Ashfords behind him, but it seems Lucella and her cousins, now aware of him, have other plans. One of them is determined to make sure he stays out of Ashford business and the way they send that message involves Stephen's cat getting horribly beaten.
As you might expect, this galvanizes Stephen to stand up to the Ashfords. Stephen dives head first into the Drucraft world, learning more about creating sigls, channeling essentia and how the various power wells found throughout London work. While he doesn't have the resources House Ashford has, he does find himself developing some unexpected skills and abilities. On the flip side, he also learns that the Drucraft world isn't exactly as he always pictured it. He always knew that the rich and powerful were the ones in control, but he never quite realized how hard it was for the lower classes to get a foothold, much less ahead.
An Inheritance of Magic is a great start to a new series. It acts as a primer to a new magic system and even though Stephen himself isn't learning everything from scratch, it seems like he knows so little that he learns almost as much as the reader does. I am very interested to see how the world around Stephen and his estranged family grows in the rest of this series.
