The Paper Magician (Charlie N. Holmberg, 2014) is a magical fantasy young adult novel set in a Victorian-era world where magic can be taught to those with potential, and each magician is bound to a particular man-made material that they choose. Well, they normally get their own choice of material, but England is suffering a dearth of Folders — paper magicians — and recent magical school graduate Ceony Twill is unfortunate: She is to forgo her goal of becoming a Smelter, and take up paper in the name of Queen and country. What a dreadful business!
And so young Ceony is apprenticed to one of the few remaining Folders in the country, Magician Emery Thane. He’s a total dreamboat, by the way. Now Ceony must come to terms with her unwanted speciality and learn all she can about the art of Folding. After all, it’s better to be a Folder than nothing at all. And it would be better to be nothing at all than to be one of the Excisioners, evil magicians who have chosen human flesh as their medium. But I’m sure they won’t show up in this story at all, right? Why would you even bring them up at all, Holmberg? Hm?
Ceony and Emery have a rocky start, but quickly fall into apprentice-master bliss, with all the teaching, learning, cooking, and eating that goes with it. At least, until one particularly poor meal, which is described in the blurb and I can’t figure out why. Giving out plot points from a third of the way into the book is the job of a review, not a blurb!
So we have a novel where stuff happens. However, The Paper Magician is very short novel. The result is a very short novel where stuff happens very quickly. Some readers might appreciate this. Within a couple of chapters, you’re up to speed on the magic system, in another couple you learn a bit more about Ceony’s past, in the next you learn a bit more about Emery, and this is how the book plays out. It feels more like a introductory novel for each character and their respective mysteries than a full book itself, but there is a story and some character development in there too!
The book has a tendency to give the reader very obvious foreshadowing. It’s not the good type of foreshadowing either, which is revealed through action or dialogue. No, most of the hints are revealed in Ceony’s internal thoughts, often apropos nothing. Ceony never thinks about anything that won’t be followed up later on. It would be inefficient.
Even though the book is quite short, it can feel like it drags on around the half-way mark. There’s a lot of exposition for the sake of exposition. In fact, the entire point of the middle third of the novel is to provide background that isn’t really used. Because of this, the short length works in its favour: Just as you think the novel is about to throw yet more detail at you, the story picks up again.
The magic portrayed in the novel is a bit different to the stuff you’d see in your old style fantasy: Magicians don’t spend years and years poring over tomes of knowledge to cram ancient languages into their skulls. Oh no, the magicians of The Paper Magician simply have to construct an object out of their chosen material, and speak a command word to it. For instance, Ceony learns how to make ‘living’ paper frogs by constructing the frog out of paper — which we might call origami, but this name is never mentioned in the book, possibly for ‘historical’ reasons — and then commanding it to ‘breathe’.
I like the concept, but this seems to make ‘magical study’ something trivial for Ceony and her photographic memory. She picks up how to build many little spells over the course of the novel, and can control other spells already constructed by Emery. At this point, she’s been a magician for something like two, three weeks? Fast learner, I suppose. And I guess the real challenge is being able to build your own spells.
Ceony herself is a fine protagonist. Nineteen years old and incredibly self-motivated, Ceony is almost a role model. Almost. She has problems with authority, but only when she isn’t getting her way. Pretty accurate portrayal of a teenage graduate, really. Most of her sense of self-preservation seems to go out of the window at some point in the novel, leaving the impression of an unstable but very clever person. She goes through some hard times, and grows up a little in the process. Some good development.
Unfortunately, Emery has a ‘mysterious cool’ personality. This means the author won’t show him laugh or cry, but he’ll do every emotion with his gorgeous eyes instead. Every emotion. Also, he won’t answer questions if he doesn’t want to. Worse, he just ignores them. Dreamboat! Given that the novel is about learning more about Ceony and Emery, we spend a lot of time reading about the magician’s past and motivations. There’s even a suggestion that he might have had a real personality once! Is this an example of reverse character development?
Obviously, any book with a teenager and a magical school is going to evoke comparisons to Harry Potter. So why fight it? Let’s start with how Ceony feels a lot like an Hermoine clone, with all the work ethic, intelligence and willpower that we’d attribute to the famous witch. To take the Harry Potter comparison a bit further, The Paper Magician seems to be the story of how Hermione would have handled being sorted into Hufflepuff: Disappointed in her lot, but making the most of her skills and knowledge.
We can even go a bit further with our Harry Potter comparison in Emery’s character, but this gets a tiny bit spoilery.
Of course, this is probably me cherry-picking particularly egregious examples. Tone and plot-wise, the novels are very different. Sure, once again the villains are bad magicians, but you can’t really get away from that when your protagonists are magicians too. I guess Holmberg could have went the Lex Luthor route mais non.
It’s a good novel. It’s short, to the point, things happen, but sometimes slowly, the magic system is interesting, the twists are obvious, but most importantly: The book is fun to read. Give it a go if you have time, or if you don’t have time, try it if you’re a fan of magical, Victorian adventures. Like most people.
– Matthew
P.S. I think the author is American, which means an English reader such as myself had to look up phrases like ‘kitty-corner’. While we’re talking about language, at no point did any character say anything particularly English despite being English. This is fine, except near the end of the novel, where Ceony uses the word ‘quid’ out of nowhere to refer to six pounds she found on the street. This fills the ‘English characters saying English things’ quota for the novel, but why?
P.P.S. How do you find six pounds on the street? Did Ceony find a five pound note and a one pound coin? A five pound note and a one pound note (Victorian-era, so it’s legit)? Was it a six pound note?! I just don’t understand.
