Let’s get the obvious out the way and let me expand on the description above. If you’ve read the Arcane Ascension series and loved Corin’s approach to life, just save yourself some time, click the amazon link above, and go and get this book. If you haven’t, but you’ve read Mother of Learning and appreciated Zorian there, same comment.
Alright, let’s start with a spoiler-free summary. Our MC, Evander Tailor, is gifted. No more tailor life for him, no, he gets to learn magic. So off he goes to magic school, wherein he runs into a few problems. Some of them are typical school-like problems, like taking too many classes or running into bullies. Others are a little spicier, but to let you know what they are would be a spoiler!
The start of the book, which I’d estimate goes up until Evander is entrenched in his classes, is the weakest part of the book. There are a few chunks of exposition and spelling things out which I pushed through, and I’m very glad I did. About a third of the way in, the pacing of the plot picks up nicely, the challenges the MC faces become much more interesting, and we eventually dig into the spoilery plot lines, and that’s all great.
I have a feeling a lot of readers will see more than a fair share of themselves in Evander. Introverted, social anxiety, prefers the comfort of books over people—I feel personally attacked.
And yet, that makes it work. The internal dialogue and thoughts of Evander feel authentic, and it’s well above some of the MCs I read, especially in system apocalypse LitRPGs. You know the sort, the entire world is upended, most of humanity is dead, their family is gone, and those MCs just shrug and carry on like complete psychopaths. Evander is not like this, he feels like a real person and that’s what I appreciate most about the work. That, and romance which is both LGBT and tastefully done, big kudos to Tobias for writing this so nicely. I wouldn’t mind more romance plots in progression fantasy books if they were as organic and natural as in this book.
I went into the book assuming the crafting and magic system would be the big draws, and make no mistake, loved it, but it was the human element that took this home for me. Go and read it.
