Author: Charlie N. Holmberg
Pages: 224
Published: September 1, 2014
Goodreads
Ceony Twill arrives at the cottage of Magician Emery Thane with a broken heart. Having graduated at the top of her class from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, Ceony is assigned an apprenticeship in paper magic despite her dreams of bespelling metal. And once she’s bonded to paper, that will be her only magic… forever.
Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined — animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic.
An Excisioner — a practitioner of dark, flesh magic — invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.
Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined — animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic.
An Excisioner — a practitioner of dark, flesh magic — invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.
My Thoughts
The Paper Magician was a book that I've been eyeing for a really long time. I remember seeing it a couple of years ago and just thinking, "I want to read this book" but didn't get a chance to until now. Initial thoughts after having read this book? I think it was a pretty nice book. I'm not blown away by it like I kind of wished, but it was a fun story to read. I really liked how Ceony and Thane were written. Lira was a bit... trope-y but it was fine.
What I found really cool was how the Folders worked. They essentially put magic into origami. Like how cool is that? After reading this book I made a bunch of origami and I couldn't get enough of it for a good couple of days. It really made me love origami again, by thinking about how COOL it would be if I could put magic into it. I actually want a book for Folders to be published so that I can buy it.
Now if I'm to be honest, I wasn't too fond of how this book started. Ceony was a bit abrasive to Thane. She called him "mad" and "insane" but he totally seemed normal to me. He didn't give me off this weird Olivander feel. He just seemed like a dude who liked living alone... living alone. It wasn't all that strange. Sure it was strange how private he was, but c'mon. The guy doesn't really go outside in the first place. But Thane got his heart cut out and it got interesting.
Something else that I really commend Holmberg on is not making Ceony magically skilled in paper magic. She spends a lot of the first few chapters reading and it totally could've happened where Ceony somehow became really skilled in paper magic considering she's only there for like two weeks. Ceony was really out of her league, and she knew it. It was really great to see how she used what little she knew to her advantage (also just that thing in the end happened like wHAT).
A warning for any perspective readers. This book is mainly flashbacks of Thane. While I understand why we have these flashbacks, I felt that it was a bit overkill and redundant after a while. I kind of like two people learning about each other slowly rather than all at once like Ceony did with Thane. It is an interesting position that they're put in now, though. Because now Ceony knows almost all of Thane, while Thane probably doesn't know much. I'm really curious to see how this works out for the two of them.
There are also little things I nitpicked about the time period. It's supposed to be set in the late 1800's-early 1900's I assume? If so, I think that there were things that should've been written differently, but it wasn't such a large part of the story that I felt like this really hurt the novel.
TL;DR
I liked this book because it shows a somewhat budding romance, but it definitely shows that there is more to come. There are some inconsistencies that I'm not a big fan of, but they weren't that big of a deal in retrospect to the novel. Even though I'm not blown away from this first novel, I'm going to continue on in the series because I really want to know what becomes of Ceony and Thane. Oddly this is more of a romance novel than it is a novel about magic.
Have you read The Paper Magician? What do you think?
