Various Thoughts

Cinders of Magic, by the same author as Advent of Dragonfire, is a rather lengthy book that stands out mostly for its near-total lack of exposition. Aside from a description of the various types of magic users (which doesn’t appear until ~250 pages in) it expects you to figure out who’s who and what’s going on yourself. Personally I don’t consider that a problem, nor do I have an issue with the large number of shifting perspectives, rather it’s the frequent technical errors and general meandering nature of the plot. It feels like that by the end we’ve only just come to the beginning and I can’t really say all that build-up was beneficial or even necessary.

I went into Argus Philo and Montgomery Quinn‘s The White Mage series with no small amount of trepidation. There were a great many warning signs that I ignored out of general boredom and… I’m glad I did. This is one of those rare sex-heavy series that does not substitute porn for plot or character development, and it ends up quite entertaining despite there being a large amount of obvious wish-fulfillment going on with how things play out.