Book Reviews

Review by gigglebox 73

This is a book about a girl and a boy. Both don't know their true identities, and have lived their lives completely different than they should have if things had been right.  This is a great book filled with magic, and magical things!  This is the beginning of the Septimus Heap series, and, at the moment there are 4 books in all!

Review by Inkgirl

I have one question, Angie Sage, what were you thinking?  That's a lot of work you put into this sorry excuse for a story, so riddled with holes (logical and otherwise) that it is bound to collapse under you.

Magyk.  I've seen it on shelve, on Amazon, in BooksAMillion.  So finally I read it, sort of.

The story is a girl and a boy who are mysteriously misplaced at birth.  The Princess ending up in the hands of  a poor family and the poor family's seventh son disappearing to not-very-subtly to appear on the page.  The story is nice enough.  A nice, generally likeable family, a country on the verge of disaster.  The sort of things that appear often in books.  But, since those elements appear often in books, pick up a different book with them in it.  Seriously.

The world of Magyk is populated with wizards, witches (what the difference is is not really made clear), and man-eating trees.  Horay.  Witchcraft appears more and more often in contemporary literature as all fine and good.  Whatever.  If you're going to write a story-here are some things to keep in mind: a good story follows certain rules, have good and bad and a distinction between, keep the villains villains and the protagonists protagonists, oh yeah and DON'T SHOOT YOUR POOR STORY FULL OF LOGICAL HOLES.
     The world in this book is ridiculous.  There are logical holes like you would not beleive.  Logical flaws that, in fact, render the whole darn story pointless.
     The main flaw is death.  Hello!  If you want to write a story, make death mean something.  One of the main characters (what was his name?)is dead.  He died long ago but shows up almost every day to hang with old friends.  The only differences are that he cannot go places he never went in life, he can be invisible, and he can fly.  Oh and he doesn't have to eat.  I mean, if you were as poor as the heaps and had seven kids, wouldn't you just kill Bobby off?  "Oh, he'll stick around.  We just won't have to feed him."  Whenever the ghost dude shows up at the Heaps' place and seeps out of the floor, the kids are all like "Yay!  Uncle whatshisname!"  Not "Eeeek!  Ghosts in the floorbords!"  Why did his apprentice, Madam Maricia have to be the new Head Wizard?  Why couldn't they just keep Mr. Ghost as the undead head wizard?  Why is Marcia traumatized by the day Mr. Ghost got killed?  Why does the kingdom have this problem of who should rule the kingdom?  Why don't they just get the assasinated queen to rule as undead queen?  Why has the villain spent his life trying to learn how to live forever?  Won't he just stick around as a ghost (oh and by the way, the villain is one of the worst villains ever to walk across the printed page; he's stupid and boring-doesn't do anything in the whole entire book).  Mr. Ghost spies on the bad guys.  Are they stupid or what?  Why don't they just send their dead friends to spy? Augh!  This book is so stupid.

There's nothing original in the whole book.  There are logical flaws like you wouldn't believe.  And apparently after book one the series is unbearably boring (that's just hearsay).  Sure, the illustrations are good.  And I thought it was kind of cool that at the end there was this section telling you what happened to all these minor characters.  Points for illustrations and that section for the end.  But not many.  Find a book that's more worth your while.

I hate wasting my time.