This Just Read: The Paper Magician

I'm a new Amazon Prime member and one of the perks is you get a free book every month, chosen from a list of soon-to-be-released titles. In August, I chose The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg. It's the story of Cleony Twill, a young magician-to-be, leaving school and being assigned to the magician from whom she'll learn to become a Folder--a master of paper magic.

Magic, in this tale set in fin-de-siècle London, is carried out through man-made materials. Smelters deal in metals, others deal in rubber, glass, or other materials. Paper magic isn't very popular and our heroine is forced to apprentice herself to a Folder to build up their ranks. Once an apprentice "bonds" to his/her material, that will be their medium of magic forevermore. There's one type of forbidden magic: blood magic.

So, our story is about nineteen-year-old Ceony and Magician Emery Thane, as they begin their journey as master and apprentice. Ceony's not at all happy about becoming a Folder (she'd dreamed of being a Smelter). Early on in the book, it got into some details of how paper magic was done--through precise folding and enchanting--like magical origami. That part was pretty interesting.

Soon enough, however, Thane's ex-wife (and forbidden blood magician) tears out his heart and flees with it. Then our apprentice has to go rescue him, eventually going on a journey through the chambers of her master's heart.

So, what started interestingly enough soon became a rather dreary love story, as our heroine falls for her magician master as she fights to save him. Yawn. When I got to the end, it seemed like the whole things was little more than a vignette. In a Harry Potter book, for example, the scope of this story would be akin to the retrieval of the locket horcrux by Harry and Dumbledore. I got to the end of The Paper Magician and was expecting the rest of the novel to get moving--but it was over.

It's a series, apparently. I'd read others of they were free, but probably wouldn't spend money.

This Just Read: The Hot Zone

On a recent trip, I finished my thriller (The Odessa File) and moved on to some non-fiction, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston. Ebola is in the news and I'm interested in good medical writing. I remember back in the early 1990s, when the book was published. I was working at a bookstore and was responsible for ordering the New York Times best-sellers. The Hot Zone was on our shelves for some time.

It's a largely-narrative tale of the initial outbreaks of Ebola in the 1970s and early attempts at treatment and containment. The main thrust of the book is the incident in Reston, Viginia, in 1983, when a company that sold monkeys for research was hit with a new strain of the virus.

The story follows the USAMRIID and CDC vets and researchers as they dealt with that particular event. There were fears of a general outbreak in the human population of Northern Virginia, but they never materialized. Several workers at the facility became infected, but this string of Ebola was, apparently, harmless to humans.

The book was fast paced and well written, but it's not a great medical/scientific non-fiction book. It's mostly told in narrative style, with little scientific background to inform the reader (mind you, when it was written, we didn't know much about Ebola--and still don't). There are disease books that I've found more informative (and more interesting), especially the excellent The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry and The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (about influenza and cholera, respectively).

Still, The Hot Zone was a good read for my trip.

This Just Read: The Odessa File

So, I was doing some travelling and needed something not-too-serious to read on the plane. I discovered that Frederick Forsyth's books were available on Kindle and snagged an old favorite: The Odessa File. Written in 1972 (and made into an excellent movie starring Jon Voight), I first read this thriller back in the early 1980s. Returning to it thirty years later, it holds up very nicely.

Set in the 1960s, it follows a young German journalist as he learns about the atrocities carried out by the Waffen SS during World War Two (and after). Our hero starts hunting a Nazi who's living in Germany under a false identity. The politics should seem dated, but read as if they're stripped from today's headlines.

I'm not going to give away the excellent ending. If you're looking for a good thriller, you may want to give this a shot. I may get The Day of the Jackal or The Dogs of War for my next business trip.