The Master Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
1.5 but rounded up to 2 because I can at least see why other people might like this series. I am clearly not the target demographic.
As usual my reviews contain spoilers so if that bothers you stop reading now.
So I read these books because they’re free on KU but I don’t think I’ll continue with the second series. I don’t know. I might. They’re short so they help boost my reading challenge goal. I’ll think about it.
Every compliment I had for this series went out the window with this one. The first half of the book was Ceony preparing for her Magician exam, which obviously wasn’t a source of stress or conflict because she proved in the first two books that she’s the greatest magician in the world and is perfect.
Like with the rest of the series the main focus was on the sort of forbidden romance between Magician and apprentice. This book showed it was a real problem and other magicians have fallen for their apprentices and it’s a practice that needed to be stopped. So yeah, that’s cool I guess.
Most of the book was Ceony preparing for her exam, except not actually preparing because as I said before she’s perfect. She’s not only perfect and better than any other folder on the planet, despite only being an apprentice, she’s finding time to study every other magic discipline and cook and clean and save the world.
The second book built up two villains that appeared to be a force to be reckoned with. The entire world fears them so of course, they can hold their own in a fight. Then again, they never fought Ceony and her mastery of everything ever created. Ceony easily disposed of her big bad guy in the second book but the more dangerous one escaped. I was optimistic cause I thought, at last, there will be some real tension. There will be a moment where Ceony actually faces a worthy opponent and the book has some real conflict instead of just the will they or won’t they get together conflict.
Nope! Not only did Ceony track down this at large, all-powerful villain easily, she and Emery walked away in relatively okay health. Even though an excisioner is capable of killing their opponent after just touching them, and even though Ceony and Emery were both tied up and at Siraj’s mercy, they somehow never came close to dying. They overpowered him and killed him twice cause he’s just that powerful and weak at the same time.
Then there were like two chapters about Ceony passing her magician exam, graduating, and finally being able to date/probably marry Emery.
R.K. Gold 