The Last Magician

Not my jam, really, but my son and his girlfriend were reading it, so I decided to give it a shot.

There are a lot of characters, and time travel is involved, so the book is all over the place. At any given moment, I had the barest understanding of what was happening. Characterization was poor, and so all the characters ran together in my head. I didn’t even figure out who the main protagonist was until about 50 pages after I should have.

Also, there’s the “Because…Magic” syndrome. I encountered this in the last Harry Potter novel, and the “Doctor Strange” movie from a couple years ago. Plot not working out? Change the rules, because…magic.

When reality has no rules, then you can just shift them around to make the plot work. When this bogged down, suddenly there was some new principle of magic with applied this particular situation…

The ending builds to a climax…then another one…then, I think, one more. And there are some insane double-crosses and plot twists at the end that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about.

And, of course, the ending isn’t even an ending, because you have to sell a three-picture deal, so the entire book is really just a set-up for the sequel.

I would have bailed, but for the reason I was reading it in the first place.