The Master Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Throughout her studies, Ceony Twill has harbored a secret, one she’s kept from even her mentor, Emery Thane. She’s discovered how to practice forms of magic other than her own — an ability long thought impossible.
While all seems set for Ceony to complete her apprenticeship and pass her upcoming final magician’s exam, life quickly becomes complicated. To avoid favoritism, Emery sends her to another paper magician for testing, a Folder who despises Emery and cares even less for his apprentice. To make matters worse, a murderous criminal from Ceony’s past escapes imprisonment. Now she must track the power-hungry convict across England before he can take his revenge. With her life and loved ones hanging in the balance, Ceony must face a criminal who wields the one magic that she does not, and it may prove more powerful than all her skills combined.
The finale in the Paper Magician trilogy begins two years after the events of The Glass Magician, and has Ceony fighting an old villain while trying to pass her Magician’s test. (Boy, can anyone let her finish her apprenticeship in peace, ffs?) Right when she is shipped off to another Folder for her Test (an exceptional circumstance as Emery doesn’t want their future relationship to taint her career if he administers the test), she learns of the Excisioner she and Emery had helped arrest, loose and on the run. Naturally, she doesn’t trust anyone besides herself to get the job done, so she goes after him herself.
The story and plot of this novel was better than Glass Magician, and we get some cool skills being exhibited by Ceony as she switches back and forth between different materials and combines them in an innovative way. My only question about the success of all her ‘missions’ is how does the magical society not have safeguards against these. There is a scene where she uses a mirror to spy into a council meeting and I was like, are those other people so unimaginative magicians? (Forget being part of the Criminal Affairs squad, Ceony should consider a career in becoming the Head of Security for them – so many weak spots!) While she is actively spying and trying to search out the Excisioner, she is also trying to prepare for her exam with the victim of Emery’s bullying as her examiner (good luck with that, Ceony).
While overall, I still consider this story to be good, I have had problems with some things from the last book. Firstly, even for a more liberal minded England (I mean, girls are also being allowed to learn alongside the boys in the Magic Academy, so win I guess?) they barely have enough characters of color. In fact, the only named character of color is a villain, and if you think I am going to ignore the fact that this novel is set around the same time that colonization was the trend, you underestimate my pettiness. Simultaneously, there is also the fact that during the course of the novel, opposite-sex apprenticeships are about to be outlawed (generating urgency for our Ceony to pass her test ASAP or be separated from Emery until she does) because of the risk of romantic entanglements, which just feeds into the erasure of existence of any queer characters. I am not a fan of teacher-student relationships (it is an imbalance of power) and Ceony and Emery were not of much interest to me, so all that manufactured tension with miscommunication (despite her knowing their fate is set) was just too much.
Overall, a good ending to a series which had a unique magic system, and some good adventure.
Previous books in series
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