Review: "Sufficiently Advanced Magic" by Andrew Rowe

The early going of Andrew Rowe’s gaming-inspired “Sufficiently Advanced Magic” ($3.99 digital, self-published) left me not quite sure what to expect, but I ended up with a very pleasant surprise and a great read.

The story, which finished second in this year's Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off, follows Corin Cadence, who is set to enter the Serpent Spire for his judgment. If he’s successful, he’ll receive his attunement and know where his powers lie. If he’s not, well, he’s not likely to return. Corin comes from a powerful family with a demanding father, so expectations are high.

He has his own plans for the Spire, though. Corin’s older brother, Tristan, is one of the ones who didn’t return, and he intends to become powerful enough to climb the Spire, find his brother and bring him back.

Corin’s judgment doesn’t go quite as planned, though, landing him in a bad position both with his family and a visage of the Goddess. He'll need some help to unravel the tangled mess his life has become.

Memory Lane: "Sourcery" by Terry Pratchett

This has been a very strange year for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten through August of a year only having read about a half-dozen books. Certainly it hasn’t happened in the last 30 years or so. I really can’t say what’s made it that way. I find myself at another one of those strange turns in life, but I’m used to those now, and I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve read outside of a few DNFs.

The general funk around my reading this year, though, made me decide it was time to dive back into my Discworld re-read, and just my luck, I was at the book that started it all, “Sourcery” ($9.99, Harper).

During my college years, I was a regular at several local used book stores. I didn’t have the money for new books, but I could drop a dollar or two on a used one. Most of the stores around here gave you credit for the type of book you traded – fantasy/SF could only be traded for fantasy/SF, for example – but then I found one that traded for anything. I collected boxes of romance novels that my older female relatives had laying around, westerns from a grandfather and anything else that I could find and built a huge pile of credit there.