MAGIC TIME [Hardcover]

Marc Scott & Hambly, Barbara Zicree (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Unknown (2001)
• ASIN: B0028QHO4Y
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Magic Time, February 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Magic Time (Hardcover)

This book is initially exciting, perhaps buoyed by Hambly's writing skill. But it quickly becomes a sort of cut-rate, bad comic book cross between Stephen King's The Stand and Sean Stewart's Galveston. Something happens -- we don't get the intellectual satisfaction of learning exactly what -- in a top secret government research facility. Technology stops working, and some people metamorphose. Two foci of presumably destructive power appear -- a rather confusing plot point -- and our questing band of heroes must tackle the first one.

There are too many characters for the modest length of the book, and most are not well drawn. The cliched imagery verges on the ridiculous. It really is a comic book -- one person appears to be changing into Catwoman. The plot is fast-moving but shallow and unbelievable. While the basic idea is an interesting one, the book never gets off the ground. It comes across as imitative, lacking themes of its own.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A choppy read, April 24, 2002

By 

Merryl Gross (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Magic Time (Hardcover)

A secret research project Goes Horribly Horribly Wrong, messing up a bunch of people's lives. Watch them suffer.

I had a very hard time getting started with this book. At first, a lot of characters got introduced, in snippets no more than two pages long. Then some stuff started to happen... in snippets no more than two pages long. You can really tell that this story started off life as a movie script. But I can tell why they never made it... there are just too many characters thrown at you too fast.

Then stuff starts to happen, and we start checking in with all our characters, round and round and round again. Some of them get together. Some of them just disappear, and you find out later that something more final happened to them. Some of them seem to just achieve their purpose and walk off.

I think this work would benefit greatly if the authors picked one or two viewpoint characters and stuck with them, rather than visiting the viewpoints of so many of them.

Warning: this book is clearly the first in a series. It ends with several serious outstanding questions, and our heroes preparing to deal with more stuff. It never answers the fundamental question of what the heck is really going on... and what might happen if our heroes did manage to "deal" with it all.

At this point, I recommend you wait for the paperback, or even take it out of the library to see if it's to your taste. I don't know Zicree's work, but Hambly fans should look at it only for completeness' sake. There's not much of her 'voice' in here.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Comments on "Magic Time", December 16, 2001

By 

Ralph Isovitsch (St. Thomas, VI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magic Time (Hardcover)

I am long time fan of Hambly, but cannot recommend this book. One of Hambly's great strengths is her character development skills. I feel that they were stifled here. The characters in this novel are at best two dimensional. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she was working with a writer whose credits mainly include television scripts.

The pace of the book is choppy and lacks the detailed scenes and backdrops that are the hallmark of Hambly's work.

Read any of Hambly's fantasy novels or any of the awesome Benjamin January series for a true representation of what Barbara Hambly is all about.

Hopefully she will avoid any further work with her writing partner for "Magic Time".