I have taken a bit of a hiatus, but now I’m ready to get back into the game of producing pointless reviews  of the Amazon preview for yet another book.  This time, the victim is The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg.

Incomplete Book Review: The Paper Magician

At the beginning of this Amazon preview we are informed that there are not enough folders, and so, as you do, Ceony was conscripted into this role.  That this tragic assignment leads almost inexorably to a decrepit mansion, which houses a reclusive magician, should come as no surprise given the four or five sentences that precede these events.  The disembodied narrator informed us earlier that Ceony had spent the night before burning every slip of paper in sight like the second coming of Fahrenheit 451.  Come to find out the new mansion is also made of paper.  Well, so much for foreshadowing, but I can only see bad news on the way for Ceony.  Dark and foreboding turns into exceedingly disturbing as we learn that the mansion’s owner, Mr. Thane, maintains a wind chime in the corner of the room where no wind will ever hit it (if there is a perceived emphasis on any part of that sentence, let it arbitrarily fall on the word “learn”, which seems about as appropriate a place to put as the book would lead us to believe).  Just when we begin to think this preview will be equipped with nothing but descriptions of paper-crafted hoarding, this Thane guy finally shows up and boy does it turn out that he is rather boring.  The preview closes with Thane showing Ceony around the house.  As an expected surprise, the house is adorned with various things made of paper: a skeleton man, paper birds, paper balls.  We have to imagine that someone’s failed career as an origami artist led to these dilapidated descriptions, but there is no expected explanation of heavy ingestion of psychotropic substances, and the author seems wont to simply describe without explaining.

Here I must explain that this is not a complete review of the Amazon preview as I have skipped the pages that skip pages.  If this sentence is confusing to read, it is because it is confusing to conceptualize, and I would not be able to do justice to these page skips without channeling a mixture of Sarah Palin and the 2000 movie Memento.  And, at any rate, doing so would be less conducive to the second part of this review, wherein I will attempt to finish the story with my scant imagination.

How the story would end if I had written it:

At the end of the preview, Ceony has just come into the clutches of a mad wizard, Mr. Thane, but the shockingly mundane paper illusions were only the beginning of the intense banality.  As it turns out, Mr. Thane has come up with a way of doing origami with his mind and with no folds at all.  Just when Ceony thinks she is at the limit of her learning, she comes across a box of pigments in the basement while Thane is out one day harvesting trees.  Ceony learns to embrace her budding Bob Rossian ways, infusing her birds and skeletons with tie-die colors.  However, after Thane returns and sees the colored paperworks she’s created, a darkness falls over the man unlike anything she’s ever seen at the (insert name of the school she went to that had a forgettable name here, if any at all).

And then one day, she finds a human elbow under the couch.  As it turns out, Thane has been recycling local people to make the color, mashing their skin and clothing into pulp.  Ceony is primed to be the latest victim when the unthinkable happens: Thane falls madly, deeply in love with her.  Thane must now choose between his love for ugly origami and the beautiful Ceony.  In any other story, she would have alerted the authorities and Thane would have been taken down like the po in a bad 90s movie, but this story is unique, this is a story that breaks all barriers of modern conscience and morality, superseding even the vast theories of Niche with a twist of bad B-movie vibe that can only be transmitted with one of those

cool-looking

word art

pages where

the words

form a

staircase

down the

page.

But, as you likely know, an actual ending would be too trite, too un-compelling a send off to such an aväntˈɡärd work like this.  Thus, the final scene is merely Mr. Thane looking at a paperweight that is made entirely of paper, wondering whether he could, should, or would need to make a paperweight for the paperweight and another paperweight for that paperweight.  We are supposed to read everything and nothing into that scene.