Review: The Paper Magician

This is one new fantasy series that I am so excited to follow -- if you like stories about witches, then The Paper Magician is a perfect novel to add to your reading stack. Ceony Twill is a recent graduate of the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, but she feels that her year of hard work there is wasted when she's assigned to be apprenticed as a paper magician. Ceony had dreamt of being a smelter (a metal magician) but with the paper magicians' population dwindling, she has no choice but to live with and learn from the eccentric Magician Emery Thane. As her apprenticeship progresses, Ceony realizes that there is an elegance to the paper craft. She learns to animate paper creatures and to bring the words in a storybook to life, but her lessons are interrupted when Magician Thane is attacked by an Excisioner- a practitioner of the darkest art, flesh magic. Thane's heart is (literally) stolen, and Ceony takes it upon herself to bring it back. Setting out to save Thane's life means an adventure that Ceony would never have dreamt of, and though she puts herself in terrible danger, she learns that paper magic is far more powerful than she thought.

I'm not even sure how I stumbled across this book on my Kindle last week, but before I knew it I was halfway through and raving about it to anyone that would listen. If I were to sum up this book in one word it would be: quirky. I loved it. What drew me in is the classic character of a girl freshly graduated from prepatory school, with big ideas about the world, intelligence, and spunk. In The Paper Magician, Ceony resigns herself to becoming a Folder, but soon she realizes that you get out what you put into it, and her eagerness to learn had me hooked. I also loved that she has depth to her character: she loves to cook, has an enviable work ethic, and there's something tragic being alluded to in her past (albeit that something isn't revealed until the end). I also thought the whole concept of the book was creative; there are a lot of books written about magic and this one is unique for sure, especially with its different divisions of magical occupations. Though this book only came out on the first of September, the second installment in the trilogy is set to be published in November. You know I can't resist a good series, so I may have pre-ordered the second on my Kindle. Oh, and did I mention that this is Holmberg's debut? Bravo.

Bottom Line Rating: 5/5

Title: The Paper Magician

Author: Charlie L. Holmberg

Publisher: 47North, 2014

Price: $4.99 (in the Amazon Kindle store)

ISBN: 1477823832

Format: E-book

Source: Kindle

Book #39 of 2014