Book Reviews

I've recently finished two books. 

The Magicians
The first one is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The basic premise is Harry Potter meets Narnia. The protag is one of those pompus smart kids (Whether I am one as well or not is up for debate) who has this "I'm fed up with life" attitude. He's constantly looking for an escape. It starts off with escaping in reading, and then a harry-potter like school of sorcery.

The premise is pretty interesting, and well executed. The characters attitude and hedonism got to me a couple of times, but it brings up an interesting question: If magic lets you do anything, what do you do to keep yourself occupied? After graduating from school, there's another instance of world-hopping, which kind of threw me for a loop. One alternate / hidden reality is one thing, but two is pushing it for me.

The other interesting thing about the plot is the pacing. The antagonist is very absent throughout the story. The conflict in the novel is very much focused on the character and his search for the right escape. At first I thought it was an interesting pacing choice, but it yielded one of those "I am villain, hear me roar" speeches that seemed out of place.

Angelic
The second book was Angelic by Kelley Armstrong. I'm a huge fan of Armstrong's work, she manages to hit all the right buttons to make me enjoy a book. This work was a novella, from my favorite narrator, the Half-Demon/Witch Eve.

I love the character, even though SOMEONE (*coughcoughsushicough*) said she sounded like a Mary Sue. The plot's pretty simple on this one, a bag & tag for the Fates. Despite being novella-sized, however, there's some nice twists to keep you guessing. Dropping the dime on Jeremy kinda threw me for a loop, I didn't remember that in her other books, but it might have been in the Anthology I missed. Still great story, as always. Finding her outlining course online was a big win, thank's to Tez Miller for pointing that out to me. That will be given it's own post in a few days.