I don’t think I really liked Blue Magic. It’s not that it was a bad book, but there were just a lot of little things that rubbed me wrong until eventually t all came together into this box. The elements I liked from the first book were less prominent and the ideas I didn’t much care for were expanded upon which is unfortunate.
For instance, there’s the whole thing about fairyland where the vita has frozen everything? That bit I didn’t care about? That is half of the book, or so it seems. Maybe only a third. And there’s characters in it that I just do not care if anything happens to them, good or bad. There’s a man meant to be a romantic rival and I just don’t care at all.
Speaking of, there’s a lot of romance in this book. Astrid is meant to be with a guy and because it’s predestined, there’s a lot of mentions that they will end up together with no actual developing of that relationship. Which I’ve learned tired me even more than romance, and I have talked about how I feel about romance in books.
The story is also very different from what the first book was. Where the first was framed as how the world came to be ruined, this one is meant to be much grander, but there’s more about what’s happening than the actual character motivations and actions that I’m much more interested in. Instead of being in the story, I feel like I’m watching it from a distance and I can’t really make a connection with any of the characters.
Speaking of the characters, there’s a whole bunch of new ones. I hope you like characters that have names and single personality traits because there’s too many of them in one book to let them have full personalities. Someone died and I have no idea which one it wasI. Apparently it was sad, but I only know that there was a camel and he was important, but I don’t know who he was. What he did. Why I should care as a reader. I don’t even know his name.
Everything seems to be done as a means to an end. Astrid is a chess master and socially inept and incapable of really helping herself in a lot of scenarios. It’s an idealized version of what might actually happen, where everyone’s just okay with the powerful woman being in charge with the most minimal argument. And, as contrast, a competent woman being in charge in fairyland, but having an uprising that kills her.
While I do like a lot of the ideas here, I wasn’t really a fan of the execution and it didn’t feel like a sequel to the same book Maybe taken separately this would be fine, but it’s not what I liked about the first. If you want to find out what happens, maybe pick it up from the library.
