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Magyk - Angie Sage
2/6/09 08:20
Silas Heap is a seventh son and supposedly a fount of wizardly power, but he trades in his Apprenticeship with the Extra-Ordinary wizard for a position as an Ordinary wizard, so he can have a normal family life with Sarah. Returning with herbs for his own newly born seventh son, Septimus, Silas finds a baby girl hidden in the snow. He takes her back to his home in the vast neighbourhood of the Castle, only to find that his son has died while he is away. He and his wife, Sarah raise the girl until her tenth birthday, as if she is their own daughter, Jenna. However spies are lurking, looking for Jenna, as the cruel, ruling forces want to exterminate any trace of her biological family.'Magyk' is the first book in the 'Septimus Heap' series, which follows the Heap family and their friends as they try to fight off the dark forces that are taking over their world. As the series is named after Silas’s son it’s obvious that Septimus Heap must be alive, but it’s intriguing trying to work out where he is. At the beginning of the book I was sure I knew who Septimus Heap was, but then little things made me doubt myself and then slightly bigger things made me mistrust my doubts. Usually I’d have been frustrated by a book that didn’t reveal such a crucial secret until the end but ‘Magyk’ managed to keep me guessing until quite close to then end.
This book was fun to read. It was inventive, well written, extremely descriptive and funny. The book’s world is fantastical but also dystopian, as she includes a ruling force that has deposed the monarchy and renumbers everything, to exclude any hint of individuality. Every detail of the world is investigated and Angie Sang makes time to take the reader on explorations away from the main plot, enriching the book considerably. At the end of the book is a section that looks at the fates of some of the smaller characters after they left the main plot. Sage cares about her characters and seems to have spent masses of time carving their world out in her mind.
However, this amount of detail can be distracting. I raced through the first two hundred pages, but the tiniest thing would break my concentration when I reached later parts of the book and I put that down to the overwhelming amount of descriptive detail offered. I would drift away into other thoughts as characters and clothes were outlined, even though this was achieved with swift, spot on descriptive strokes. While this is an adventure story a large part of the book is spent with the main characters holed up in a cottage, far away from the villain. This left plenty of time for the children’s characters to be developed, which I enjoyed. But it also left me feeling craving a bit more connection to the main ‘good vs evil’ plotline. After their escape from The Castle, which is dramatic and tense, early in the book the children seem to frustrate the villain’s plans easily. The final battle between the children and Dom Daniel, the dark wizard, felt a little flat and anti-climatic.
On a side issue: my copy of ‘Magyk’ came with one of those new age guidance stickers on the cover, describing it as a book for children aged 8 – 12. I have to be honest and say that this did put me off, I thought the writing in a book that 8 year olds could appreciate might be a bit simplistic. If I’d seen this book bearing that sticker when I was fourteen or so I probably would have passed ‘Magyk’ by. I don’t know whether schools are expanding kids vocabularies faster than they did when I was at school, or if the publishers just put that age range on because the main characters are quite young, but there are plenty of words in this book that I wouldn’t have understood when I was eight. I’m still not sure age guidance stickers were such a good idea. What do you think?
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