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Saturday, August 16, 2008

Half Magic by Edward Eager



Link to Amazon synopsis: Half Magic

As I mentioned in the last post, I had a basket full of series-starters. This was one of them. It was a different choice for me given the shortness of the book and big print, but the name drew me in, and there was a big shelf of similarly bound books, so I thought I would give it a try. It was a little on the disappointing side.

The story idea was fine, but the characters were a little ... obvious. Even for this age group. So you get past the characters and back to the story and it was mediocre as an overall product. I do like to branch out and read stuff that I feel like I learn from as a writer, and so I decided to give the next book a try. Unfortunately it turns out the Eager wrote a lot of similar, yet independent stories about children and magic, and that this wasn't a series by my standards. What a shame. Like I said, it wasn't a knock-your-socks-off-book, but I was ready to give it a go as a series where I thought that some of the character issues could be worked out, etc. Unfortunately no such luck.

In Eager's defense (since I have been pretty hard on his work here) this was an older book, and like many older authors (C.S. Lewis, Frank Baum, etc.) he didn't pace the story as quickly as many contemporary authors (and readers) prefer to. That probably has something to do with my opinion. If you like older j. Fiction, then you might disregard some of my opinions here and give Half Magic a try.

Date Completed: 8/5/2008
Rating: 2.4

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