Reviews and Comments

Points of reference for this title are The Magicians and The Book of Skulls, two vastly superior novels. Six talented young magical adults are given the chance to join a secret mystical society that maintains the Library of Alexandria, but only five can do so, the other must die. What a stupid way of doing things, killing 16.7% of the most talented young magicians on the planet. Is this a society of cretins? No matter, once you start reading, you'll be hoping all six of these boring and obnoxious brats are killed. And do you know what? It will be a release for them; freedom from having to utter the stilted, trite and pretentious words the author forces into their mouths. I've watched plays written and performed by young farmers' societies with better dialogue. Blake makes George Lucas look like William Shakespeare. The world building is practically non-existent; how do all these magical folk interact with the mundane world? Are there regular human janitors and secretaries at the New York University of Magical Arts? How does magic work here? How can Nico be the scion of Cuban investor capitalists living in Cuba? Where are all the society members? Part of the problem is that the book is very claustrophobic - it's the six candidates interacting with each other with few outsiders, so it's lots of dialogue and interior monologues with little action (there is an action sequence in the first half of the book, but it's not well written (shocker!). And when will anything actually happen in this shitty novel (answer: not until the last twenty pages, when the author dumps a series of events upon us - the pacing is somewhat lacking). Libby and Nico make a nice couple and I hope they hook up in book 2. Oh and it's only adultery if you're married.

So you wake up and you're on a boat. A curious mist shrouds the landscape and in it there are screaming noises. There's also the small matter that you, and the six other folk on the boat, have no memory of who you are. And you're all armed. It takes some talent to ruin this intriguing premise, but ruin it A.J. Ryan does - the literary equivalent of missing the net from six yards out or fumbling the ball just before the endzone. How does he do it? 1) Flat and purely functional writing 2) Lack of depth to the interchangeable characters, most of whom exist to impart specialist knowledge relevant to a situation - i.e., infodumps 3) Clichéd and pointless characters - the villain of the piece and especially Golding 4) Elements of the plot - let's execute this dumb plan that doesn't make any sense 5) There's an old Scottish TV ad for stock cubes that ends with the line "Pea and ham? From a chicken?", which makes more sense than than Ryan's extremely ropey science. Also, that's not how antibodies work.

In addition, some elements remind me very much of M.R. (Hey! What's with all the initials?) Carey's 'The Girl With All the Gifts' but without the sympathetic characters or quality of writing. Might make an ok film, but the kind of book that deters you from reading more by the author.