Magyk, by Angie Sage

Update.
I finished the last major update of my novel, Book of the Dragons. I'm toying with a new title as the current one seems more like a book with pictures of dragons or something like that. The one in my head now is Cosette's Story, but that doesn't sound like it's fantasy. So Cosette's Journey came up too. But would a guy read a book with a girl's name in the title? Me, for one. But I'm a rare breed.

But, back to the novel itself. What I'm doing now is performing searches of certain words that should be cut. I've noticed that I start a lot of sentences with the word 'well', as in "Well, I don't know what we should do", when "I don't know what we should do" would work perfectly. When I noticed I wrote this way, I also noticed I sometimes talk this way. I also start a lot of sentences with the word 'so'. This wouldn't be as much as a problem if this was simply a character quirk, but I do it to all my characters. So, some of those are getting cut :)

After that I'll write a new query letter and start querying publisher. At the same time I'll be able to move on to my other novel, The Girl With Two Souls, which is still in first draft mode.

Review.
Tonight I finished Magyk, by Angie Sage. It is the first book in the Septimus Heap series and is targeted to kids 9+.

First I want to share the things that just annoyed the crap out of me while reading, then I can be nicer later.

• There are a lot of run-on sentences
• Character names are used repeatedly when a pronoun would work
• The point of view (the person we see the story through) shifts way too much, often in the same paragraph
• Sometimes the point of view is seen through the family dog, a couple of times it came from a bug. There's a scene near the beginning where a lot of the characters are falling down a garbage chute. During this scene we go into the minds of everyone falling and what they think about it, including the dog. This leads to many pages of falling when I just wish they'd hit the ground so we can get on with it.
• Any word having to do with Magyk is capitalized and in bold
• Important phrases are capitalized or in italics

The author started as an illustrator and wrote children's books (like toddler, children) and it seems she has no confidence in the intelligence of her reader. Maybe its my fault because I'm an adult reading a children's novel, but I've read Harry Potter.

And so has this author. There are several parallels to Harry Potter and a little too much borrowing. I almost threw the book at the wall when I ran into a character named Trelawney, but I was at work and that's not a good thing to do.

Beyond all of that, the writing seemed to mature by the end. I liked the climax, and once I got past the things that annoyed me, I realized that the book was pretty entertaining. The thing I fear is that with a good book deal, and the books getting a movie contract the author won't mature. I could be wrong and hope I am (the fourth book in the series, Queste, comes out in April)

The question is, all in all, are these books worth reading. If you can put aside the irritations (and maybe I'm just more critical now that I have to edit my own work) then this book is pretty good. There's magic and adventure and mystery and lost identities and even one plot twist that I didn't see coming until nearer the end. For 8 bucks I'd say its worth it.

The next book on my list is The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's modern tale of Dracula. It's a 642 page behemeth that I've been wanting to sink my teeth into for a while (lame pun intended).