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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not the best nor the worst I've ever read, February 12, 2009
This review is from: The Accidental Sorcerer (Rogue Agent) (Mass Market Paperback)
Bought this book on the strength of the cover blurb, always a dangerous thing. Initially it was the lighthearted humorous fantasy I was expecting. Somewhere around Chapter 16 it took a major turn into darkness; no foreshadowing or transition that I got anyhow. It's like two different stories stuck together. It is a decent tale, but I'm not sure if I will pick up the second in the series or not. Also, either the copy editor or the typesetter needs to be replaced. There was one chapter with some paragraphs repeated 3 times and the end paragraph sorely out of place; it took me a while to figure out the proper order.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun tale with a split personality, February 25, 2009
This review is from: The Accidental Sorcerer (Rogue Agent) (Mass Market Paperback)
Gerald Dunwoody is a "Third Grade" wizard who has been failing at one job after another. After he loses his job as a magical inspector for the government, he takes a job as Royal Wizard for the kingdom of New Ottosland. And that's where the story really starts to get interesting.
K.E. Mills has a gift for descriptive writing. Her characters were all physical presences in the story. She also manages to write realistic sounding dialog. Though a few of the plot twists were fairly obvious, the final conflict between Dunwoody and the King was well written, and showed the growth of Dunwoody's character from a failing naive wizard to a major magical being struggling to take responsibility for the consequences of his failures and magical power. Mills manages to mix interesting characters with consistently paced action to create a story that reads quite quickly.
The Accidental Sorcerer starts out feeling like a farcical romp of a tale, as if PG Wodehouse had decided to turn Wooster into a magician. Then half way through, the book turns into a fairly serious story of the corrupting influence of ambition and black magic. This left the novel feeling like it had a split personality. Both parts were well done separately, but together they had a rather jarring effect. I spent the second half of the book waiting for it to get funny again. It almost felt like Mills had changed her mind about how she wanted to write the book, and then didn't go back and change the first half of the novel. The bad editing also irritated me. At one point, an entire paragraph was repeated.
Mills has a good story here, and the end of The Accidental Sorcerer sets up the rest of the trilogy. Assuming that the writing at the end of the novel sets the tone for the rest of the trilogy, it seems that Mills has created a world where she can explore serious issues of responsibility and power in a relatively light setting. Though this shouldn't be mistaken for serious, heavy fantasy, it is a good romp of a tale, and the intriguing cast of characters makes me willing to pick up the next book in the trilogy to see what mess they will get into next.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Crapola, May 20, 2009
This review is from: The Accidental Sorcerer (Rogue Agent) (Mass Market Paperback)
Once I begin a book I simply cannot stop until it is over. It took me nearly a month to finish this stinker. The plot is exposed entirely through dialogue, the characters are flat and two dimensional but they talk so much it's a wonder nobody simply started screaming "Shut up and move the story along!" halfway through the book.
I couldn't tell if the story was trying to be zany, or serious, or both. Sometimes it was a little like Strange and Norrell and other times it was like a bad Harry Potter rip off teetering on the edge of Disc World.
All the male characters are cardboard, flat and 2D, but the female characters have only slightly better attempts to fill them out. Description is lacking in just about every detail, instead the author relies on people hitting you in the face with blatant expose through long drawn out conversations that will bore you before the first one is over.
Anyway, skip this one and go read something else this summer. The fact that there is a second one coming out only goes to prove you can't keep a bad thing down.
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