So this is the book that got me out of my slump. Weird right? First off your introduced to Damon a Magician in a really cool scene that sucked me into the book right away. Of course, our main character is Jason which didn't suck, because Jason is actually a good character, but I really liked Damon and I wished there was more of him in the book. I loved the incorporation of our real magic, you know card tricks and the whatnot because it almost makes it seem like this could be happening.

While yes, the story for me was a bit linear and I knew what would happen before it did, it was a good story. Jason was a bit too good a magic for him to just have been introduced to magic. I sort of read it as one huge montage and while Jason was probably studying magic for far longer than I thought, Abrahams made it feel like it was too fast. One character that bothered me was Allegra. I wanted to like her so bad, I mean a powerful badass magician that is a female. Instead, I grew annoyed with her in almost every scene she was in.

I'm grateful to this book for helping me past my slump and I kinda hope this is a series rather than a one-off only because I felt like the story of Jason Bishop and magic isn't over. ( )

Oh dear. Well, I needed something to listen to, and this was available, so I listened to it. I'm trying to think of positive features, because it wasn't a terrible book. However, it had several aspects that I found deeply annoying, and many that were sadly mediocre, or at least, not to my taste. I think if you like the Grossman Magicians series, you might like this one. It's got a bit of a Da Vinci Code puzzle spy book thing going on, too, so there's that. Neither of those things appeal to me at all.

I found it to be full of flat, undeveloped, people fighting a nonsensical war. The main guy, Jason, is 30, but I haven't read a YA book in recent memory with a character so frozen in a 15 year old mindset. Plot holes upon plot holes, characters who never die (if they are magic) and pretty much all die (if they are human). Slow in plot, with a great deal of foreshadowing, so the reader knows what's going on and just has to wade through the time until the various players clue in.

There's a story about a farmer and a chessboard that's supposed to be the profound heart of the book. I must not be a magician, because I thought it was a lousy story that didn't really make any sense at all. However, if you want to really enjoy this book, take a drink every time someone grasps something. Here are some words not featured in the book: grab, grip, clutch, clasp, hold, clench, lay hold of, catch, seize, snatch, latch on to, grapple, get one's hands on. Plummeting seems to occur with astonishing frequency, but grasping? Wow, practically every other sentence.

The ending would seem to imply that it's a series. ( )

So this is the book that got me out of my slump. Weird right? First off your introduced to Damon a Magician in a really cool scene that sucked me into the book right away. Of course, our main character is Jason which didn't suck, because Jason is actually a good character, but I really liked Damon and I wished there was more of him in the book. I loved the incorporation of our real magic, you know card tricks and the whatnot because it almost makes it seem like this could be happening.

While yes, the story for me was a bit linear and I knew what would happen before it did, it was a good story. Jason was a bit too good a magic for him to just have been introduced to magic. I sort of read it as one huge montage and while Jason was probably studying magic for far longer than I thought, Abrahams made it feel like it was too fast. One character that bothered me was Allegra. I wanted to like her so bad, I mean a powerful badass magician that is a female. Instead, I grew annoyed with her in almost every scene she was in.

I'm grateful to this book for helping me past my slump and I kinda hope this is a series rather than a one-off only because I felt like the story of Jason Bishop and magic isn't over. ( )

Sort of shades of an urban fantasy DaVinci Code blended with a Dresden Files-ish protagonist. ( )

This is a profoundly average book that reads more like a novelized TV series than a novel. Blandly relatable protagonist with an unhappy childhood and distant father? Check. Interesting settings that would look really great in CG? Check. Clichéd long-running battle our hero’s thrust into with no prep? A prophesy that suggests he’ll unite the two sides? Characters of colour who are only about 75% realized? Check, check, and check. There are even flashbacks! An unavailable girl next-door! And everything Jason’s confronted with is accepted way too quickly. My mind would be blown by some of the things Jason sees even in the training complex, but he wraps his head around them in minutes—not to mention some of the truth-bombs dropped on him.

Abraham does keep the pace moving though and is pretty good at throwing in twists that are just a bit out of the ordinary. Some of the places the story went were interesting and unconventional. At the same time, though, between the fast pace and Jason’s “oh, okay, cool” attitude to everything, I never got much sense of the stakes. (I was told them, but I didn’t feel them.) I never quite got into his, or anyone else’s, head either. It was all kind of flat.

To sum up: I’m probably not going to remember this at all in a year and would have DNFed it except it was just good enough to tempt me onward. Skip it and go read something else edgy, like The Magicians.

Warnings: A number of characters have Tragic Pasts™ that some readers might find triggering. Characters of colour are occasionally introduced just in time to be redshirts. Others… I’d like to see reactions from readers of the same cultural and ethnic backgrounds because there were no alarm bells but things didn’t sit quite right with me.

4.5/10 ( )