A young mage hidden at birth and raised in anonymity by a lowborn family? Check. A coming of age story with a young male lead and an obvious love interest? Check. An evil rival that wrongs said love interest? Check. I could keep on going but you get the point. If you have read a lot of fantasy literature then you have read this all before, and while there is nothing terribly wrong with The Blacksmith's Son, there is also very little to make it stand apart from the competition. The five book Mageborn series gets off to a mediocre start with this one.

Years ago all of the wizards in this land were killed off by a group of assassins, well except for Mordecai who is the son of a great wizard. Mordecai was secreted off as a baby and raised by a lowly Blacksmith and his wife, who keep Mordecai's secret to themselves. Of course he is also raised with no awareness of his special magical abilities until he comes of age and they start to manifest. This just so happens to occur when Mordecai attends an event at the local Lord's castle for the first time and his social clumsiness causes him to offend a visiting noble. The offended lordling also happens to be an evil wizard - and just like that the only two wizards remaining in the world are now young rivals - what are the chances? Of course this rivalry bodes ill for Mordecai as he is completely untrained in how to use his power and his enemy has much experience that he lacks.

As Mordecai rushes to learn about his power, the stakes grow from rivalry to violence and eventually toward potential war between kingdoms. With his true origin finally revealed Mordecai must come to terms with his new place in noble society, the subtleties of inter-kingdom politics, and of course his love for Penny, the beautiful girl he grew up with and never noticed before now. All of these challenges are handled by Mordecai in a manner that lacks complexity and unfortunately Penny's character isn't written any deeper. In fact, a couple of days after she is sexually assaulted by Mordecai's rival she just shakes it off and decides to take her physical relationship with Mordecai to the next level. I am sorry but that's too soon. All of the characters in this book move too quickly from one event to another without allowing enough time for their personalities to change and grow. This is unfortunate because the story arc is sophisticated enough to warrant better character development but you won't find it here.

To be fair, I didn't hate it, but it also never grabbed me. Todd McLaren does a good job on some of the male character voices but his 3rd person narration felt as artificial as the characters' actions. All in all it adds up to an uninspired package that had the potential to be a lot more than it is.