The Master Magician (Charlie N. Holmberg, 2015) is the final novel in Holmberg’s The Paper Magician trilogy. In the same vein as its predecessors, The Master Magician tells a tale of Ceony Twill, apprentice paper magician with a secret that would rock the foundations of magic. But will she spill the beans? Or will she take it to her grave, helpfully being dug by vengeful blood magician Saraj? And most importantly, will she pass her magician’s exam and finally be free of the fear that her forbidden relationship with master Emery Thane (total dreamboat) will be discovered? Unmarked spoilers for the prequels, ahoy!
After having survived a terrible ordeal against the villain Grath which ended with the blood magician’s death by her hands, Ceony is down one friend (see ya, Delilah) but up one Earth-shaking secret: Ceony, and Ceony alone, can switch her magical binding between materials. No longer limited to being a mere Folder — a paper magician — Ceony controls unbelievable power.
Due to fears that Ceony would be treated as a second-rate magician all her life if tested by Emery, he sends her to study under Magician Pritwin Bailey, an eminent Folder whom Emery used to bully back in school. This goes about as well as you might expect. But as is pointed out in the novel, no one’s going to accuse her of being a favoured student after being tested by such a potentially biased magician.
Meanwhile Saraj, the blood magician captured by Emery in the previous novel, has escaped custody and is trouncing around England doing blood magician-y things and being generally rude. But is he out for revenge, or simply trying to escape recapture?
Torn between endangering her life and studying for her magician’s exam, Ceony chooses to repeatedly antagonise her host and throw herself in harm’s way. Unlike in the previous novel, no one calls her out on this behaviour, but this might just be because she’s gotten better at hiding her more extreme pursuits. Also Prit is a pushover.
There’s very little tension in the novel. Because the story is split between the exam and Saraj plots, neither has time to develop. I’m not even sure why the exam plot line is even present when the more pressing issue of not having your heart stolen exists. Anyway, Prit turns out to be a jerk — big surprise — but other than being occasionally mean to Ceony he has no real antagonistic tendencies, even though the reader is meant to dislike him. Even when Prit has the ability to show true antagonism, he doesn’t.
By the time Saraj becomes a major force in the novel, it’s nearly over. There’s no real sense of threat. He’s an equally ineffectual antagonist.
So what happens in this novel where Ceony has an exam to study for, and a villain to chase? Well, she studies for her exam and chases the villain. And that’s it. Nothing happens for two hundred pages except vague problems that aren’t developed: The board is banning same-sex apprenticeships, but Ceony doesn’t care as long as she passes her test, so that goes nowhere; Prit’s apprentice fancies Ceony, but she isn’t even remotely interested, so that goes nowhere; Prit turns out to be a mail thief, which really should have went somewhere…
So Saraj is a naff villain, Prit barely qualifies as an antagonist, and nothing happens until the last ten or twenty pages.
The Ceony/Emery relationship is now in full swing, and like every ‘will they/won’t they’ that is resolved, it’s boring. Other than peppering their speech with words like ‘love’, and one slightly steamy scene, the dynamic hasn’t changed at all from The Glass Magician. The couple spend less time together than in the previous novel, because of the whole ‘non-biased exam’ pushing them apart until Ceony—hopefully—passes. So while they’re ‘together’, it doesn’t matter because they’re rarely in the same place. I was never interested in this relationship, and The Master Magician doesn’t help change that.
I’d say you should only read this book if you want to see how the trilogy ends. If you’re really into Ceony + Emery, the novel might provide a few enjoyable moments here and there. If you want a fun read with an interesting plot that builds on the previous novels in the series… You might want to give The Master Magician a miss.
– Matthew
P.S. What happened to Lira, the blood magician that Ceony froze at the end of the first novel? And come to think of it, why didn’t Ceony’s material-mixing gift make an encore appearance? It wasn’t explained despite being a major driving force for the second novel and made a lot more sense than the bind-unbind-rebind stuff. Anyway.
P.P.S. At one point Emery goes to a paper factory that is producing products aimed towards Folders. Why is there a whole factory producing this stuff — what this stuff does is never specified — when, as the first novel established, there are only twelve Folders in the world? It seems a little excessive.
