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.

Review: The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

In the last few months of senior year at the Avalon Hills prep school where her father, George, was a teacher and a hero for saving students from a gunman, Sadie Woodbury watched as her father is removed from their home in handcuffs. It must be a mistake. The police are wrong. They must be. Her father, the best man in the world, whose family created the prep school and parceled up their land so Avalon Hills was born, cannot be the man police described as they read her father his rights, handcuffed him, walked him out to the cop car, put him inside, and drove him away. Her mother, a nurse, was in shock. Sadie, watching her hero, father, and teacher disappear from sight couldn't get it through her head that the same man -- her father -- hero of the town, celebrated, loving, and willing to take down a gunman intent on killing children at his school could possibly be the same one that girls from her school had accused of sexual impropriety during their last ski outing. Sadie's head was still whirling from her brand new love with Jimmy, her first ever sexual encounter -- was it moments or years before? -- whirling now from shock, anger, and disbelief. How is this possible? It had to be a mistake or the girls (there were girls) her father had been sexually involved with? Somewhere along the way, her whole family had fallen through an insane rabbit hole and ended up in bizarro land. 

George Woodbury's life and his family were in shock. How could this be? According to their lawyer -- and the Woodbury's son, who had become a lawyer and lived in New York -- George would have to stay in jail at least until Tuesday, after the long weekend, when he would appear before a judge and the case against him would be dismissed because it wasn't true. George would not be arraigned, no bail would be set, and he would be back home with his family and return to his life. Alexander was certain of that. 

Zoe Whittall's novel would be barely a couple of chapters if George Woodbury was the victim of a colossal mistake like being wrongfully accused of another man's abuse and misuse of 13-year-old girls under his care on a ski trip. Whittall is a better author than that. She would not drag the reader through an emotional rollercoaster for nothing. Would she? 

Having been present when police took my father away from an anniversary family celebration in cuffs and accusing him of exposing himself in a public park and running from the police, which ramped up the severity of misdemeanor flashing to felony flight, made my interest in The Best Kind of People personal and my fascination with the subject and the emotional fallout acute as I dove head first into the novel. I was not disappointed . . . at first . . . and plunged into the Woodbury family's emotional cauldron as the waters heated up. 

I understood Jimmy's mother's boyfriend's interest in writing about the Woodbury tragedy from Sadie's perspective, not just because she was living with them and he had access to the whole family's pain and distress, but because as a writer I sympathize with the urge to get closer to the fire and risk getting burned if I get the story on paper. I didn't expect Alexander to be gay and having his first gay sexual encounter with a teacher and coach, but the only gay people I knew were salesmen and workers at the shoe store where I first worked and sex wasn't a common break room topic while sipping a Pepsi or eating a microwave burger. I had no experience of living in an exclusive community or going to prep school. My life was middle class all the way down the line. I was as eager to get to the heart of the matter as Jimmy was to write about it. My only peephole was through the eyes of those most closely associated with the family through Whittall's words. 

During the months that George was in jail, the family were roasted slowly over a barbecue, basted with regret, disdain, outrage, fear, and acceptance. Sadie's mom was anxious to put their house on the market and use the money to pay George's lawyer since the family bank accounts held far less than she imagined. Where had the money gone? 

It is never easy reading about, much less being involved, in a close knit family's destruction, especially for so little payoff. The ending seemed far too convenient and George never did get a chance to respond to the allegations nor were the allegations more than stories told by a group of girls bullied into adding their stones to the pile ready for brandishing. The individual stories about the Woodbury family were engrossing, surprising, and fascinating, but were less than equal to the rest of the story about what George Woodbury did while chaperoning barely pubescent girls on a school ski trip. Reading The Best Kind of People was rather lacking in sound and fury -- and answers -- in the long run. I give Zoe Whittall's novel 3.5 stars out of 5 for the end result . . . and lack thereof. A 21st century version of Ordinary People which fizzles like waterlogged fireworks. 

He Likes Me

Chili Bob called me yesterday morning to chat. Aside from his ankle issues, he mostly talked about his youngest daughter and her first boyfriend. She has commented on her Facebook page that she's feeling wonderful. That can only be the whores moaning -- in the vernacular, hormones talking.

Beth is in the first flush of love, her first love and she's nearly out of high school. He likes me rings through her mind as she mentally plucks the petals of a mutant rose or daisy filled with petals that tell her 'he likes me, he likes me, he likes me...' There are not petals so perverse as to whisper 'he likes me not,' not at this stage of the flush. The world is brighter and the colors more spectacular. Food has no taste because the words 'he likes me' taste so good nothing can compare, not even her favorite deep fried turkey and sweet potato souffle.

Nothing tastes as satisfying as those words, probably because Beth has come to love so late in her teenage years and, for the first time in her life, she knows how it feels to be liked -- by a boy -- a cute boy. It's the same feeling that Sally Field set the movie industry snickering over and Stephanie Meyer turned to box office and literary gold -- the late bloomer overwhelmed by endorphins and questionable judgment. He likes me.

I remember those feelings. Doesn't everyone? I came to them early, before I started school, and felt them often whenever a new boy cast his eyes my way and smiled right before he rushed over to ask me to go steady. Parties where we played kissing games were extra sweet when THE BOY had to kiss me amidst titters, teasing, and tinges of red in my cheeks.

Beth didn't have those roller coaster times. She has spent her time playing basketball and auditioning for leads in plays all over the northwestern part of Ohio -- and getting most of them. She played ingenue and romantic leads opposite men and boys, feigning those emotions she never had the time or the interest to try on for real. It was all make-believe until HE came.

It's probably not that surprising HE was someone she knew from auditions and plays they acted in together and this time life imitated art. That they share the same passions (acting and singing and dancing, and a little bit of basketball) helps the romance along, but it's really just two teenagers getting together for the first time as they bounce around on endorphins while their whores keep moaning. Loudly. Often. He likes me.

None of us are immune to the power of 'he likes me,' not even as adults. Once the endorphins ping and the whores moan, we are lost -- unless we're too jaded and experienced to even notice. Not even money and stock options can take away that thrill. He likes me. The most secluded and antisocial of hermits will come out of their caves smiling, eyes twinkling when they realize -- he likes me. It's human nature. It's biology. It's the thrill of new love when everything is limned in golden light that blurs imperfections and hides flaws and inconsistencies.

Those first golden days, weeks, months (however long) allow carte blanche for mistakes, blunders, errors, and outright lies. The whores are moaning too loudly for anything else to get through. He likes me. It's no wonder that love turns to hate when the cracks in the foundation appear and all beings to crumble into the relentless sea of 'but he liked me.' From there, the rapid slide into pain and disbelief and outright stalking with intent to maim, torture, and punish drown out the last vestiges of 'he likes me' until there is only an infinetessimal skoch of hope. Even that little flicker of fading light will flare up again when the realization dawns that 'he likes me.' All hatred dissolves until all that is left is that all encompassing golden light and smiles ride the waves of endorphins and whores moaning once again. The subsequent crashes are more spectacular -- and far more dangerous -- until 'he likes me' whispers once again. No wonder people prefer the roller coaster to the carousel where there are no highs and lows, no depths of despair and volcanoes of anger and betrayal to counter the dizzying heights of 'he likes me.' But who can live on such titanic emotional struggles for long?

'He likes me.'

Remember how that feels, but be wary. Few loves can last such frustrating and delirious emotions for long before burning out and leaving the taste of ashes.

I hope Beth enjoys her first boyfriend and finds her passion for acting, singing, and dance as a balance for her first flush of love. It's safer when you fall if your feet are flat on the ground.