Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

genre: fantasy/historical fantasy

When Ceony leaves the school of Magic where she has been trained, she is less than thrilled to find out she's going to be a Folder.  A Folder of paper, that is.  The magic of paper Folding does little to excite our Ceony and when she arrives at the home of her Paper Folding Teacher, she has a hard time gathering any enthusiasm.  But her teacher, however, is a sly one.  His way with paper is, simply, magical and soon Ceony finds there is an entire world of possibilities in a sheet of paper.  When she is suddenly thrust into a life or death situation, she has to decide if the magic of paper will be enough to save what she cares about the most.

I had no idea where this was going to go.  It did grab me from the beginning and though it was wordy and too detailed, I had to keep reading!  There is a part in the middle of the book that hit me in the face in a way that took me a long time to recover from - it was SO fantastic (as in, dripping with a fantastical kind of fiction) that it took me a while to wrap my brain around it.  I'm still not sure how I feel about the entire middle of the book.  I liked it but it just felt a little too much somehow.  And yet, I DID like it - I feel there is a lot of imagination and creativity in Ceony's world, I loved the magical construct, the romantic thread is believable.  Did I feel really drenched in the England of the turn of the century?  No.  I don't think that was the point.  It's not historical fantasy so much as fantasy that happens to take place in the past. 

It's strange how conflicted my feelings are about it but because I just only wanted to read it today and because the ideas of this book aren't leaving my head, I'm giving it 4 stars, despite the things that didn't quite work for me.

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