Review: The Glass Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

Ceony Twill, the paper magician apprentice, made her master's heart out of paper and used his paper airplane to go after the heart his ex-wife, now an excisioner, cut out of his chest.

Time moves on and Ceony continues to face odds and dangerous people, one who is so intent on destroying her, they will blow up and destroy whoever happens to be close. Ceony, undaunted and willing to reach for any tool she can learn to use, including her best friend's glass magic, she also learns how to bond to other magic arts. With what she believes are two excisioners chasing her and having managed to successfully slip the "noose", Ceony faces two dangerous men with unknown powers and magic, willing to do what needs to be done to keep her master -- and her love -- intact. Walking through the chambers and anatomy of another's heart will change not only her goals, but her skills and her own heart.

It is outside the bounds of protocol and reason for an apprentice to fall in love with her master, but extraordinary circumstances call for unusual and even more extraordinary choices. Such is before Ceony and the magic world as she battles for her and her friend's lives and learns that nothing is impossible with determination, luck, and love.

Charlie N. Holmberg's magician series is not just a turn of the century fantasy, but so much more. in 1907, there is a great school of magic, and Ceony Twill gave up her cooking career, enrolled in the premier magic school, and finished far quicker than anyone in her class and in what she knows of the history of the magicians' arts and schooling. Ceony is working hard to finish her apprenticeship ahead of schedule even though she still must deal with her master's ex-wife and the excisioners traveling and terrorizing the countryside, and especially Magician Emery Thane for casting a spell on Lira, Emery's ex-wife. Grath Cobalt, one of Lira's gang of excisioners using blood magic to upset the well ordered magicians' school and training, is determined to force Ceony Twill to reverse the spell that stopped Lira, but did not utterly destroy her. Cobalt will, like Ceony when facing Lira and rescuing Emery's heart, do whatever it takes to free Lira from whatever the paper folding apprentice did to thwart Lira's vengeance on Emery.

Sound a bit convoluted and dangerous? Not for a glass magician who will have what he wants whatever the cost.

Grath is not an excisioner like Lira because he was already bonded to glass. Somehow, some way, he must break the bond in order to bond to blood magic and become an excisioner. That is where Ceony Twill comes into the picture.

Ceony confessed her love to Emery and doesn't know how Emery feels. She considers choosing another master, another discipline, but she is bound to paper and cannot, by all she knows, break the bond and does not want to start all over with another Folder magician who can train her. She also doesn't want to leave Emery. She loves him, though it is forbidden, and not even Delilah's master is going to have an easy task enforcing the rules.

Delilah, Ceony's best friend, is an apprentice glass magician and helps the Folder apprentice to understand and perform a little glass magic of her own. After all, she must save Emery again. Emery Thane is a formidable magician in his own right and has assisted the police in capturing excisioners before. Must have something to do with his ex-wife, whom he loved and married, becoming a practitioner of blood magic and revenging herself on him.

The duel of magics between Ceony and Grath reminds me of  rock, paper, and scissors which I played as a child. How does paper stand up to glass when the magician can go anywhere and see anyone whenever he chooses? Mirrors are made of glass and mirrors are all connected if only one has the magic and is willing to learn -- and to teach. All it takes is an agile mind and the will to do whatever it takes to cross boundaries and disciplines. That is what Grath has been willing to do ever since he met Lira and followed Lira's lead. What Grath can do Ceony will do as well. She will not be only a Folder for long.

Charlie N. Holmberg has created a world wherein magic is the most potent power and where villains as poisonous as Lord Voldemort are often more dangerous and patient -- to a point. As for me, I can hardly wait until June when The Master Magician is released.

Billed as YA, The Paper Magician and The Glass Magician, though they contain violence, the violence is perpetrated out of plain sight and not described in bloody, gory detail. Imagination is as potent as seeing the violence first hand and no less frightening or horrifying. In many ways, violence in the Magician series by Holmberg is the difference between dropping a boulder in a lake and hearing about the ripples and waves caused by someone else dropping said boulder from one's own hands. Not having a video replay of the violence doesn't lessen the impact for readers exposed to violence in the world where they live and learn.

The Glass Magician is a laudable continuation of the tale begun with The Paper Magician and will continue the game of rock, paper, and scissors people play when they are young and making choices. 4/5 stars for this leg of Holmberg's magical journey in my estimation. As readers will find, folding paper is as formidable as glass.

Soiled Doves

There was a time in the old wild west that Judge Roy Bean was the only law west of the Pecos. Judge Bean was a hard drinking, hard fighting, moral man who surrounded himself with gunfighters and soiled doves (dance hall girls). As the only law west of the Pecos, this violent, imprudent man finally settled down with one of the soiled doves, content to be the law who dispensed his brand of law without restrictions and living by his own code.

He hung rustlers and thieves, assassins, and disturbers of his peace without mercy, but at least by his views a moral man willing and able to clean up the wildest patch of the west. He cleaned up his patch and settled down with a saloon girl, one of the soiled doves, and wrested his dusty corner of the west from the criminals and the dregs of society.

The problem was the soiled doves. Where Sundays were days of leisure, usually after Saturday nights of drinking, fighting, playing cards, and the usual ruckus over who pulled what card from his sleeve, the soiled doves saw their town becoming citified and tame and began to insist on spending Sunday mornings listening to the parson preaching his sermon while they sang in the choir. The old rough and ready frontier town had become safer, filled with the good people of town wearing finer to Sunday service and dealing harshly with newcomers who were less refined Sunday go to meeting trollops. The newly refined ladies didn't see to the morals of newcomers to the saloon and the town who chose the less moral portion of their upstanding population to get rid of.

Judge Roy Bean had less luck with the moral and upstanding female population of town. He recognized his soiled doves, especially his own personal soiled dove, possessed of a prim and proper demeanor that followed with the change in the town's status and high-toned feminine population, as newly whitewashed doves who didn't take to the rough and ready life of a frontier town, especially when the frontier town got a brand new general store, stagecoach stop, and restaurants just like the establishments back East. He realized his happy bachelor days when he was the Only Law West of the Pecos were behind him and he must also change with the times. He had come up in the world, no longer the Law West of the Pecos when he couldn't even handle his own soiled dove who was now the last word West of the Pecos and the arbiter of taste and refinement now that her soiled past was behind her and she wore the finest clothes from back East, a lady who would be welcome in the best and wealthiest homes of the wealthy town matrons.

Judge Roy Bean was tied in eternal wedlock to a dove white as snow that couldn't remember back to the rough and wild old days and wouldn't own up to her past as the Madam of the town's biggest and best brothel. Mention of her past brought out the vapors and fainting as though she had been tarred and feathered with the tar and feathers that bedecked dance hall girls that failed to please the gunslingers, thieves, and highwaymen that once flocked to her saloon upon arriving in town. Heaven forfend anyone who mentioned the past in her hearing or whisper that the silver dagger she still kept in her corset was the sharpest and deadliest blade in the state.

With refinement came morals higher than the mangy cats tussling over the drunks they rolled in the
streets, passed out cold from too many drugged drinks, to pay for their drinks and dances. Passing out was no excuse for not paying the bill. There were two laws West of the Pecos, and Judge Roy Bean was kinder law. Judge Roy Bean would only hang you by the neck until you were dead. His wife, Madam Moustache, would empty your pockets and slit your gizzard when you failed to pay. Then Judge Roy Bean would arrest you for vagrancy when she'd emptied your pockets. The hangover in the morning was less painful than the fleecing and jail was quiet -- at least until you were sentenced to hang and then that short drop would put a kink in your gullet that lasted until the undertaker filled it with dirt after you were buried.

That's the thing about the wild west, it was wild until you made that short drop.

Today, in modern times, we don't have the Wild West and all the soiled doves are in church come Sunday morning where they warble their hearts out for God and where the memories begin when civilization arrives in Judge Roy Bean's town. Instead we have Democrats whose memories are even shorter than those of Judge Bean's soiled doves and just as full of righteous indignation if anyone has the gall to remember the wild west when they were the rowdiest and wildest dancehall girls West of the Pecos showing their garters and their frilly bottoms on stage at Madame Moustache's Brothel and Saloon.

The thing about whitewash is that with a good hand and a thick enough paint even Tom Sawyer can cover the worst of the dirt so that soiled doves can hide the past and refashion the edifice into a Sunday meeting house fit to entertain the best of the best from back East with nothing soiled showing even on the worst gullywasher day of the week, especially Sunday.

Of course, the Democrats have a lot worse to whitewash than rolling drunks and knocking out
unsuspecting cowhands and gunslingers. Their soiled past history settles into the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and eating two helpings of the shit pie the maid shat out that morning. Whitewash is good for everything, especially covering up all that soiled, shitty past. Give that whitewash and refinement  a little time and it will gleam like a ghost town in the noon day Texas sun.

That is all. Disperse.