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.