Book Review: The Paper Magician

Considering it’s Christmas time and Harry Potter is starting to air on ABC Family, I was excited to read a YA (young adult) fantasy novel. So I picked up The Paper Magician, the first in a trilogy about a young girl and aspiring magician who becomes an apprentice to a renown Paper Magician after graduating from Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined. 

However, Paper Magic, or Folding, is seen as a joke in the young magician community. Our character, Ceony, initially wanted to study Smelting, or Metal Magic. So when she gets an assigned apprenticeship to a Folder named Emery Thane, she has to learn to deal with it, because the material you bond with during an apprenticeship is a lifetime commitment.

However compelling this magical world seems, I don’t want to mislead you. This is not a generous review.

Book Review: Girl Online

If your Facebook feed looked anything like mine this week, then I think you have heard of the book I am reviewing today. Headlines described a 24 year old girl in the UK whose debut novel has outsold any other author in the UK in its first week. That is an insanely impressive statistic, made especially obvious by the list of names she has beat (J.K. Rowling? Dan Brown?). When I clicked the link to discover this juggernaut of the literary world, I was pleasantly surprised to see Zoe Sugg staring back at me. I have been an avid viewer of her vlogs for a couple of years now, and I have always found her to be a delightful breath of fresh air in the YouTube community. Knowing what I already knew about her, I was anxious to get my hands on a copy of her book, and that I did.