Four star review, originally posted here on August 29th, 2025:
This book was highly recommended to me by my lovely spouse as the perfect book for escapism. He never recommends books to me, but was adamant about this one after several discussions we’ve had recently about trying to find books that really suck us in. He said he tore right through this entire series and couldn’t put it down. I’m usually not a big fan of fantasy, though my exposure is somewhat limited, but I am an anglophile who loves British culture (especially the humor), plus my spouse said this was different than typical fantasy. He said it’s unique. So I happily gave it a shot.
The beginning was very, very promising. I loved the first chapter. I loved the way that we introduced our protagonist to his weird new world, and introduced us (the readers) to the dichotomy of modern-day-reality and a superimposed supernatural world. Fantastic! Funny! Light and fun!
But then things started to drag. Everything rolled very slowly downhill. I was trying to put my finger on why, exactly, I started to get so bored. First of all, I’m not sure what our main focus was supposed to be on. Is it the mystery itself? I dunno, we don’t seem that interested in it. Is it our protagonist’s development as a wizard and his immersion into the wizarding world? But we barely focus on that, either. I wish we’d gotten a lot more detail about Nightingale, who seems like he should be one of our most central characters, but instead we barely interact with him, and he doesn’t seem to give a shit about training our protagonist (whose name I’ve already forgotten), and he especially doesn’t give a shit about solving mysteries. What is even his deal? We don’t know. And it seems like we’re not expected to care, either. Then there’s a bunch of stuff about the river gods, and I honestly couldn’t give less of a shit about these rivers. At first I did; it seemed like they were going to be central to the plot somehow. But they weren’t, as far as I could tell. And I also still didn’t understand at all what their deal was, or how they worked. That whole element seemed very half-baked to me.
All that being said, I liked the world we set up, and I’d be open to giving the rest of the series a shot. There are plenty of clever concepts here, and I’m interested to see if any of the half-baked elements in this book were just setting us up for fuller development going forwards. We’ll see.
Helga without the H 