The Paper Magician

This is the first short story in a series of shorts. Despite being short, it actually took me a lot longer than usual to read. The pacing of the story was all over the place and I was having a hard time staying focused on it. It’s not that I didn’t like the story, it had great elements and interesting angles on magic, I just didn’t feel sucked into the world as much as I would have liked.

The whole hunting through a person’s heart while their heart isn’t inside their body thing went on for ages, it’s most of the book, and I just didn’t enjoy it I guess. Some parts of the book also seemed rushed, while others felt excruciatingly slow to me. Still the magical concepts and ideas were very interesting, and I liked that there were limitations on each person’s magic.

I’m not sure if I’ll read The Glass Magician (the second book in the series) or not. I might pick it up on Kindle Unlimited if I get bored one weekend, but I don’t feel the need to mark release dates for this series on my calendar right now. Actually, I’m sure curiosity will get to me eventually, because I often find the second book in a series like this can sometimes be better than the first.

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Info and Description from Amazon;
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.