Sufficiently Advanced Magic: Arcane Ascension, Book 1 (Unabridged‪)‬

Some sort of mix between Name of the Wind, The Land, and Harry Potter. It has great character development, a witty protagonist, and an exciting adventure. This has been a very enjoyable book. Looking forward to the release of the next installment.

This book has a lot of great things going for it I like the world building, the magic is interesting, and some of the fights are pretty cool. This is all bogged down by a first person point of view character whose thoughts ramble on to the point I start to day dream and have to rewind the audio book bc I missed stuff.

The pacing of this story is kind of all over the place and darn near comes to a screeching halt when the main character enters academy. As I said the fights are cool but there mainly no stakes to make you feel like this fight is important, rather they just kind of happen and what’s worse is the main character has this terrible and annoying habit of constantly trying to make a joke out of almost dying or almost getting hit which takes me out of the action with these poorly placed and worded pieces of humor.

Another thing I had trouble with is I had a hard time trying to figure out what made this person the main character. Honestly there doesn’t really seem to be anything special about him, he makes it hard to like him or stay engaged with the story due to constant rambling, and for a good chunk of the book it’s almost as if he goes out of his way to avoid other characters which is terrible bc now he has no one to bounce off of. Even when characters are present though the dialogue can at most times be some of the most awkward and cringiest stuff I’ve heard. Main character will ramble on and on about wanting to be alone and not knowing how to take to people but will become one of the most arrogant people on the face of this earth. Also the author doesn’t do a good job of writing a certain masked powerful character when ever that character appears it feels like a 14 year old who just watched anime for the first time and is trying way to hard to be cool whenever they fight and acts as if they have all the answered and every single other person is behind him and laughs cockily bc of it. It’s the kind of writing of a character you read on half baked fan fic but in this book it’s a little more fleshed out not by much though.

The main character does a lot of things and behaves in a way where even when he makes a decision and suffers in some way bc of it he can see no wrong and everyone else is unreasonable for chastising him. He’s arrogant, trying too hard to be sarcastically funny,unable to have a authentic conversation or one that sounds real, and will talk about his missing brother and how determined he is to find him as he then proceeds to go to a school dance… priorities am I right.

well written and a very intriguing world and character build. Was really enjoying the book up until the main characters sexual preferences are exposed. personally I prefer that any variety of sexual activity not be included in a book. The problem for me is that the main characters sexual orientation is the opposite of mine and in a way that conflicts both with my morality and my understanding of sexuality as a Christian, thus completely breaking my connection with the main character. this book was very well written and the story was told in a intriguing manner that really pulled me in. for me, I can’t comfortably proceed with the story. If homosexuality conflicts with your morality then Unfortunately this book is not for you. I can however strongly attest to the good writing and strong character development of this book.