Steven C. (SteveTheDM) -
I came to this book because I play the trading card game called "Magic: The Gathering", and this is the first book in a trilogy detailing the world of "Ravnica" which has been featured on the cards of late. (Early 2013.) I read the first Magic novels that were ever published back in the 90s, and remembered them as being pretty pedestrian. So I was hoping that 15 years on the quality had increased (the quality of the underlying card game certainly has).
So, yeah, these are definitely better than that old stuff, but it's hard to get much more enthusiastic than that. The content here is solid but unimpressive. The writing works best when the scenes are tightly focused; the "big smash" at the conclusion of the book was confused and showed evidence of writing shortcuts. (Our heroes were bound without being able to escape until... they needed to be unbound. It was quite odd. And I could never figure out the distance between the good guys and the bad guys, sometimes it seemed large, and then suddenly they were next to each other.)
At any rate, the novel was interesting primarily because I was interested in fleshing out this Ravnica, an interest I have because of the Trading Card Game. If you don't have that interest, I can't see why you'd want to bother with these novels.
3 of 5 stars.
So, yeah, these are definitely better than that old stuff, but it's hard to get much more enthusiastic than that. The content here is solid but unimpressive. The writing works best when the scenes are tightly focused; the "big smash" at the conclusion of the book was confused and showed evidence of writing shortcuts. (Our heroes were bound without being able to escape until... they needed to be unbound. It was quite odd. And I could never figure out the distance between the good guys and the bad guys, sometimes it seemed large, and then suddenly they were next to each other.)
At any rate, the novel was interesting primarily because I was interested in fleshing out this Ravnica, an interest I have because of the Trading Card Game. If you don't have that interest, I can't see why you'd want to bother with these novels.
3 of 5 stars.
