Monthly Spotlight: Charlie N Holmberg’s Paper Magician

A short one this month, I’ve not been well – The Paper Magician, The Glass Magician and The Master Magician. (There’s a sequel story, The Plastic Magician, in the same world but with different characters; I haven’t got around to it yet but I will someday.) Holmberg has written other things that sound good and that are on my ever-lengthening list, but these were the first of hers I picked up and I was utterly charmed by them.

Our protagonist is Ceony, a young woman recently graduated from magic school and apprenticed to a senior magician. The magic system in these books is original and interesting – every magician bonds to a single element (you can guess three of the possibilities from the titles above but they may well literally be endless) and can only use that single element. Within that apparently narrow restriction Holmberg finds lots of really creative ways for her characters to do some very cool things, which is always a favourite for me where magic is concerned. You wouldn’t think paper was all that useful, but…

I suppose these count as young adult. The setting is carefully unspecified but feels Victorian-ish (I believe the fourth book is set a few years later). I’m not going to say much more because you really should go into these unspoiled if possible. The characters are funny and sweet and the story is clever and they’re just happy, well thought out books. In trying to describe them to Mitchell I said they felt like a fluffier Tamora Pierce, if that helps anyone, though there’s a solid and action-filled plot under the cute.

(…it’s also going to be pretty obvious for anyone who knows me even slightly to pick out why I like them long before the end of the first book. But that’s neither here nor there.)

 

Monthly Spotlight: Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence

Shorter one this month, recommending a new thing I just finished reading that impressed me rather than an old favourite. I don’t quite know how to categorise the Craft novels; the setting is a little bit steampunk, a little bit sci-fi, a little bit fantasy and a little bit something else. The basic premise of the world is that it takes place a little way into the future, where water has become the defining resource of the planet and power belongs to the companies who produce and control it – by using local gods for fun and profit, as well as mage lawyers.

(Shoutout to the Something Awful Let’s Play forums for recommending these: they covered one of Gladstone’s interactive text games, Choice of the Deathless by Choice Of Games, which is also set in this universe and lets you explore how the magic system works with your own character.)

The books (so far) are as follows: Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, Four Roads Cross and The Ruin of Angels. Each one has its own separate plot, but also ties in to each of the others and builds up to an overall story in the way so many authors try for and so few actually manage. The separate protagonists lead separate lives and their paths cross as the series goes on, and it manages to feel natural and plausible rather than being forced for the sake of the plot.

We’re checking all the representation boxes this time – there are a lot of queer and bi characters of different genders, various ethnicities (amongst others, two of the books are set in almost-Mexico and almost-Hawaii), and several trans characters, and it all seems (from my outsider perspective, for whatever that’s worth) to be well done and natural and none of them feel like they’re there just to prove a point. It’s just an inclusive setting in a way you don’t often see.

I can’t say too much without giving away the plot, and these are books you need to experience for yourselves. There’s a lot of detail and a lot of thought and some very clever moments. And interesting magic, of course. The Craft is powered by starlight, and blood, and gods, and other stuff depending on who’s using it. There’s necromancy, religious/clerical magic, your good old-fashioned raining fireballs, some neat dimensional stuff – something for everyone, with a healthy pile of humour on top.

Turns out Max himself says it better than I can. From his website:

The God Wars ended, and we’re living with the world they left.

I write the Craft Sequence series of books and games, set in a postindustrial (and post-war) fantasyland, where black magic is big business, wizards wear pinstriped suits and conduct necromantic procedures on dead gods, and day-to-day commerce rests on people trading pieces of their souls for goods and services. The Craft Sequence books are legal thrillers about faith, or religious thrillers about law and finance. Plus there are hive-mind police forces, poet gargoyles, brainwashing golems, nightmare telegraphs, surprisingly pleasant demons, worldshattering magic, environmental devastation, and that deepest and darkest evil: student loans.

Have fun. I did.