Review of The Paper Magician

Amazon

Blurb

Ceony Twill arrives at the cottage of Magician Emery Thane with a broken heart. Having graduated at the top of her class from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, Ceony is assigned an apprenticeship in paper magic despite her dreams of bespelling metal. And once she’s bonded to paper, that will be her only magic…forever.

Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined—animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic.

An Excisioner—a practitioner of dark, flesh magic—invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.

From the imaginative mind of debut author Charlie N. Holmberg, The Paper Magician is an extraordinary adventure both dark and whimsical that will delight readers of all ages.

My Review:

Five Stars

I’ve been wanting to read Paper Magician for a while now and finally got around to reading it and I’m glad that I did, because now I’m hooked. And I can’t wait to read the next installment and see what happens next- though I’m curious if it involves different characters since it is titled The Glass Magician and Ceony and MG Thane are paper magicians.

When I first started reading this book I wasn’t sure what a paper magician was. I initially just thought of a regular magician, but didn’t consider magic being broken into different categories and a person being bound to one object forever, which thinking about now sort of stinks. Can you imagine being bound to something you hate forever, never to be able to change that? That’s what Ceony fears as she journeys to MG Thane’s home. She doesn’t want to be a Paper Magician, but she has no choice in the matter as that’s what she was chosen to bond to.

We follow Ceony and watch her grown into her paper magician skills, and become quite good at the art. But then something horrible happens. And she goes on a dangerous mission to help her instructor. I think most students probably wouldn’t do the same, in her situation, especially college environment. But then again if I knew someone’s life were on the line and I was the only one willing to help them I’d do what I could to save them. So Ceony did just that. She risked her life to get the one thing that could save MG Thane- his heart. I know if I would have went through what she did I would have been a total wreck when I got back to the house, my whole world would have crumbled around me. She went through some crazy things to get MG Thane’s heart back, but she did it because she cared for him.

And I think the thing I love most about this novel is watching Ceony’s mind change about paper folding from one of hate to one of love. In the beginning she felt trapped, but as the story progressed she learned to love the item she’d been bonded with. Like we all learn to love the cards we are dealt in life. Sometimes we are not happy in the beginning, but we all come to be satisfied in the end. Which I think is a lesson we can all learn from Ceony. We may not like the cards that are dealt to us, but they are dealt to us for a reason, so we just need to follow through and one day that reason will be spelled out to us.