Dear Spellbook

Blurb

Hello stranger, my name is Tal, and I’m not an adventurer—those people are crazy. I’m just a sorcerer who is masquerading as a wizard. Oh, and I’m searching for answers about my parents’ mysterious deaths. Also monsters and other foes seem to show up wherever I go.

…All right, I see it.

My new traveling companions are seasoned adventurers and are teaching me their ways—or at least they were before something happened to Time.

The same day is repeating itself over and over, and I’m the only one aware of the resets. If I ever want to get past this day—and the horrific hangover it always starts with—I’ll need to find a way out by myself.

It turns out there are mysteries aplenty to unravel in this remote forest town of Crossroads, where I’m living the same day over and over. But my most vital resource might already be in my possession. My previously useless Spellbook is starting to exhibit some very strange abilities, and they could be just what I need in my quest to escape this temporal prison.

This is my story. My diary of sorts. Don’t judge too harshly, I had a rough day.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first published book on KU.

Dear Spellbook is a curious thing. In most time loop stories, the time loop is front and centre in the story. In this novel, it’s one of two concurrent plotlines, or—more simply—there’s the “before loop starts” plot and “after loop has started” plot, but they’re woven together via flashbacks.

Not gonna lie, the jumping around confused me for the first 20% of the book when I wasn’t sure what was Tal writing in the diary about his day, or writing about the plot immediately prior to the loop, or writing about events even more in the past. Because all of the writing is done in the same tense (past tense recounting of the past), and sometimes it’s only a paragraph or two that’s set in a different time, it can be easy to lose track. That said, it is a nice change of style from the other books I’ve read on my holiday, where the narration is more conversational to the diary than your standard first-person.

In another surprise, I actually enjoyed the out-of-time-loop plot line more than the time loop plot, which is a first for me given how much I love time loops. The tension of Tal being maybe exposed, trying to solve problems in a wizard-like way, was fun. The small chapter interjections fleshed out the world in a really nice way without being long enough to bog things down. But let’s address the dragon in the room; the cover has a fun dragon on it and I wanted a dragon companion out of the gate and I am still waiting! Dammit, Peter, you’re gonna make me wait until book two, are you? A cunning plan. I kid, for there are dragons in the book, I was just expecting one to play an important character or companion, which hasn’t happened so far.

To further set expectations, don’t go into this expecting some Mother of Learning exploitation of the time loops, at least in the first book. Tal doesn’t go nuts with it, nor does he manage to resolve or figure out anything about the loops in the first book, and it ends in a very unexpected way (unexpected as in think of a DM making a random encounter roll rather than a nice twist you could have seen coming). I’m curious how it will play into book two, and lucky me, I think book two is coming out in a month, so I’ll figure it out soon.

What to expect:

• D&D inspired magic system.
• No levels via a System, but discrete power thresholds semantically.
• Time loops that aren’t repetitive, but also not exploited to power-level.