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I wasn’t going to go out of my way to read The Magician’s Land. I’m so ambivalent about this series. But there it was on my library’s New Books shelf … it seemed almost rude not to borrow it. At the very least I was hoping to find closure. Honestly, I got more than that. This is a series that has steadily improved over the three books, with The Magician’s Land probably offering the…
One of the best parts of any fantasy series, for me, is when the author finally explicates the way in which magic works in his or her universe. Is it spell-based? Song-based? Dance-fight-based? Sometimes this happens right away, almost as soon as the main character discovers he or she is a wizard. Sometimes it unfolds gradually, as the characters become more familiar with their powers. But the diversity of magical systems is one of the…
If you write enough book reviews, eventually you start sounding like everyone you never wanted to be. Today, I'll be the annoying guy who brags about how he saw everything coming. That's right, I found this book utterly predictable from start to finish. Even the Arctic fox sex scene.
The Magicians is a very postmodern type of fantasy, deconstructing as it does the Narnian-style childhood fantasy of saving the world. It's one of those curiously…
If you were an investment banker before the 2008 recession, and you had just begun your first vacation in four years prior to moving from New York to a cushy new position in London, would you take on a job unpacking and cataloguing an ancient library for an elusive, eccentric, and extremely wealthy British couple who also happen to be nobility? That’s what Edward Wozny does in Codex, and it changes everything. On the…