Bryan

This series seems to be running out of steam.

Reviewed: 07-17-20

Terry Mancour is on Book 11 here, which is absolutely incredible. The scope of this series is astounding and Thaumaturge continues expanding the scope.

However, in Thaumaturge we find Minalan seceding control to his lieutenants for most of the story. In the other Spellmonger books where this happened, Knights Magi and Court Mage, the perspective was shifted to the person in charge, the character making the decisions. This would have been more interesting from Terleman, Carmella or Gareth, since they did all the work.

Another problem was that none of the antagonists were any kind of threat at any point. Spellmonger has struggled with a proper antagonist since Minalan dealt with Isily in book 7, enchanter.

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2 people found this helpful

a great addition to the spellmonger series

Reviewed: 05-16-19

This one follows Pentandra, and really expands on the character. There is virtually zero warfare, but there are some small fights which keep it exciting. Pentandra is a great character, and I am glad this book focused on her experience. However I do prefer the books that follow Minalan. If you liked the others, definitely read this one.

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2 people found this helpful

A good change of pace for the series.

Reviewed: 10-08-18

The narration was excellent, on par with the rest of the series. As others have mentioned it is a coming of age novel, but there is also a solid amount of world building within the tale. Not my favorite of the series but definitely still a good listen. But if you go into it knowing Minalan is entirely absent, (with the exception of the first and last chapters) it's a very enjoyable story.

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Entertaining read

Reviewed: 01-09-18

The story is very fun and entertaining, although it does contain one or two of glaring plot holes. This isn’t a huge deal to me, mostly because the book was pretty lighthearted and funny. The book was well read and performed, there were only one or two points where I couldn’t tell which character was talking, but the main characters were entertaining and believable. Definitely worth a read

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Great followup

Reviewed: 06-17-17

This story builds on the first book very well. It is a different tale though, revolving more around conspiracy and betrayal than the first. There's plenty of excitement and action, and the narration is at least as good as the preceding novel. If you liked the first book definitely give this one a read.

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This story is grotesque.

Reviewed: 06-02-16

I am a huge fan of Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Lullaby and Haunted, but this was the worst book I've finished in my adult life. Palahniuk spends the majority of the book talking about genitals, in excruciating detail. If you've ever spent too much time staring at a single word and had to word start to look weird and then look wrong you will have experienced this book already. Except its about vaginas. This book looks at vaginas in such extreme detail it starts to sound surreal and absurdist. It's a one note book and it can't get off that note. Normally what I like about his books is how the plot goes through a metamorphosis from one thing to another but this one just gets stuck. I think that was the point of it but even still I didn't enjoy it at all. Skip this and spend your money somewhere else.

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1 person found this helpful

great performance.

Reviewed: 05-05-16

I should've expected about 40% of this story was going to be talking about food, it's in the title. But it was really good.

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A mixed bag

Reviewed: 03-09-16

As someone who has been playing video games since the early 90's and has considered myself right there at the traditional core of the gaming community this book opened my eyes to many of the atypical views of video games.

Its a compilation of different articles read by different narrators and some of these are much better than others. A handful of the truly eye opening ones were undermined by the narrators reading, particularly the ones detailing transgender roles and sex in video games. While I found the content of the piece fairly good the reading of it made it sound almost like an erotic novel rather than social commentary and that was the low point of the book for me.

The book definitely is worth a listen despite its flaws because the gaming community at large does need to have an elevated awareness of these issues and can only benefit from a broader definition of what constitutes a game and why people play them.

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12 people found this helpful