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Spellwright (2010)

by Blake Charlton(Favorite Author)

3.61 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0765317273 (ISBN13: 9780765317278)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Tor Books

series

Spellwright

review 1: The magic system is this book is truly unique, based on language and all the tenets therein: vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, and spelling. Perhaps most awesome about it is the clever wordplay; misspelling and spelling are used, obviously, in both senses of the words, and certain types of spells have names that to us are parts of language, like subtext. Types of wizards include grammarians and linguists, and obviously playing a huge role in the story is dyslexia. The characters, particularly Nicodemus, are intriguing and believable. No doubt because of his own disability, the author has imbued Nico with very real emotions regarding his dyslexia/cacography. Of course, there's more to Nico than that; he's a very likeable young man, determined, resourceful, and loyal.... moreThere was one thing that didn't do it for me with this book, a pervasive enough thing to bring it down from five stars. The use of things like dragons, kobolds, and goblins just didn't seem to fit. In context they are either "textual constructs" (nonliving beings composed of magic language) or the result of, ah, magical fiddling, but seeing as the names of the mythical creatures evoke specific imagery and mythology in the reader, they didn't fit in with the rest of the world to me. They disrupted the flow of an otherwise perfectly modeled and well-built world. To explain this another way, Harry Potter, for instance, was a world in which many mythologies had root in the magical world the muggles couldn't see, hence dragons, mermaids, etc being actual creatures and fitting in neatly in context. But if you take a world as alien as Brandon Sanderson's worlds, say Rothar of his Stormlight Archive - a world built with precision that operates in distinct ways based on its magic, like Charlton's world in Spellwright - something like a dragon or goblin would not fit. Hopefully this makes sense; if not suffice it to say this disrupted my understanding of the world enough to make me frown.Still, if you pick this book up and are even the slightest bit intrigued, read it. Charlton's grasp of language is poetic and charming, and his use of it as tangible magic is fantastic.
review 2: This has one of the best cover illustrations for a fantasy book ever. The story itself is entertaining, the magic system is intriguing and different, the main character is likeable, and overall I thought this was a good book. I thoroughly enjoyed it until the near-end, which is a sudden info-dump. Not sure what happened there. Maybe it was a last-minute, ooh-there's-going-to-be-a-sequel-better-cram-some-more-plot-stuff kind of things, or maybe just poor planning and ran out of pages. It detracted from an otherwise very enjoyable story. *sort-of spoiler alert* One other thing: hero promises mysterious ghost-people that need him to survive that he'll stay with them if they tell him stuff. they tell him stuff. he leaves them. he doesn't come back. they are never mentioned again. (yeah, sequel, I know, but it seemed kind of off to me to leave that entirely unresolved at the end, and seemingly forgotten.) less

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