Review: The Magician's Workshop, Volume One by Christopher Hansen and J.R. Fehr

The Magician's Workshop, Volume One by Christopher Hansen and J. R Fehr

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was provided this for an honest review.  I'm also using this for my Popsugar Reading Challenge prompt, A Book with Multiple Authors.  I've completed 11 of the 52 prompts so far.

This book has promise, its whimsical and the idea behind the magic system is really interesting. I think if I were a much younger reader, I would enjoy this book alot more.  I think my 9 year old would enjoy this, I thought of him throughout the book as I was reading it.  I can picture him laughing at the many antics the kids in the book are apart of. There's no real plot to the story, if there was I missed it. The story is called the Magician's Workshop, but it isn't about the Magician's Workshop at all, it is about way to many characters and the time leading up to their color test. A color determines if you are going to be a mage and maybe one day make it to the Workshop, this part isn't really clearly explained and kind of confusing. Every person in the land can use magic, or projections, but commoners are limited to what they can do were as mages are not. Everything is centered around projections in the society the characters live in entertainment, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, social status, wealth, etc.

Every two chapters or so you are following one of 8 or so characters in the book and their story line which is way too many people to keep track of, and it was cumbersome to keep switching back and forth between stories. The character lines aren't really flushed out either, they don't pick up where they left off and I just found them jumbled and confusing.  Each of the characters story lines leads up to the color ceremony day where they can take different tests to earn chips for their projections, but none of that actually matters because the tests don't determine if they have color or not. The book kind of just ends and says read volume two to find out what happens next. And you don't know if any of the kids are successful, void of color, and you only know that one of them actually registers to be tested.

I will say you want to find out what happens to them when you are done and you start to care about the characters which is good, but I was left feeling like "what is the actual point to this story" when I was done.  I have a huge issue with books with no closure at the end.  I prefer structured plots with a definitive ending, even if the story line will continue on in another book in the series.  A volume should stand on its own with a beginning, middle, and end.  This just misses the mark for me.


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