I’m sure my memory stretches back to a time before I picked up a Louis Sachar book for the first time, but it seems like his work has always been present in my life. First, it was Sideways Stories from Wayside School, then titles like There’s A Boy In The Girls Bathroom before the publishing of the excellent Holes. I’ve kept reading and enjoying his middle-grade books even though it’s been a long time I was in that demographic, and was excited when I heard he was writing his first book for adults: The Magician of Tiger Castle. Just as his work for younger audiences has held up, his adult debut holds the same wit and charm.
Anatole may be a bumbling sort of middle-aged court magician for the Renaissance-era kingdom of Esquaveta, but he does have some lingering shine from the brilliance that earned him the position seventeen years earlier, and manages to eke out a magical win frequently enough to avoid too much of the king’s ire. It’s not unexpected that Tullia, the beautiful princess of this struggling kingdom, would be betrothed off to the prince of a wealthier nation, but what is unexpected is that Tullia would fall in love with a scribe and make a plan to run off with him—and that the prince she’s supposed to marry is responsible for the death of Anatole’s own one true love decades before.
Instructed by the king to make Tullia obey, begged by the princess to help her escape a horrible marriage, plagued by his own sense of justice for his late love, and guided by the deep desire not to be fed to the live tigers the king just got shipped in, Anatole’s options are few. But if he uses every scrap of genius he once had and gets a little lucky, he might just be able to tread the impossible line well enough to survive the challenge. Or, he could get fed to the tiger.
Anatole is a wry and plain-spoken narrator, and some of his deadpan observations were enough to make me laugh out loud. The question of whether he is fed to a tiger is dispelled early on, as he’s recounting his observations from the present. That makes the propelling mystery how he got out of the jam he was in 500 years ago, and how he’s still around today to talk about it. The stakes, as they say, aren’t particularly high. Magician isn’t exactly a “cozy” fantasy, per se, but it didn’t seek to keep me on the edge of my seat in a way that was really nice, given the current geopolitical climate.
Sachar has said that as he’s gotten older, he has worried that he’s increasingly disconnected from what being a kid is like, and that he wouldn’t be able to connect with them through his writing as well as in years past. But in Magician, he found himself writing to the same audience he once did: the children who have since grown up. That approach explains a lot about Magician, which doesn’t have the same pacing or vibe as most adult novels, in or out of the fantasy genre. It does, however, feel utterly like a Louis Sachar book, but with more pages and fewer playgrounds.
As much as I enjoyed Magician, and as nice as it is to find yourself in someone’s oddly specific genre, the same qualities I found charming will no doubt make it flop for other readers, and maybe even for others in Sachar’s target audience. Truth be told, the pacing is sometimes a little fast or slow, with the end coming a little quickly and much of the resolution happening off-screen. The low tension meant I easily put it down for several weeks as other books, deadlines, and life things demanded my attention. But when I picked it back up, Anatole and his problems were still there, patiently waiting for me.
Ring Reads 