Looking For a Good Book

I’m familiar with Magic the Gathering – I understand the mechanics of it and I know people who once played it almost religiously – but I have never played the game or gotten into all the various cards.  I am also generally not a fan of reading books based on a game … I’ve yet to read one that I’ve enjoyed. BUT … I am a big fan of Seanan McGuire’s work and I was definitely curious to see what she could bring to to this game franchise.

Five students from different worlds/universes/realities are invited to attend Strixhaven – an elite school for training those who already have a propensity for wielding magic. There’s a war that’s been devastating the Multiverse. Some worlds have managed to come through fairly well so far, but others have been all but destroyed. One student, Eula Blue, comes to Strixhaven from a world that has not survived the war very well, and she feels like an outsider in a community of outsiders.

The new group of students is setting the stage for a new education program for Strixhaven – something that could change the course of the war – but not everyone is happy about the arrival of these five youngsters.

I quite enjoyed the set-up and connecting of the students with each other and with their new setting. It was a nice way to introduce us to the school and the characters. McGuire writes this better than almost any other fantasist. 

Of course any time you mix fantasy and students off to a school to study magic of some kind, it’s going to be next to impossible to NOT make comparisons with the famous boy wizard books, even though we’re decades past those books. While there are similarities – it’s school for learning magic! – the differences are clear as well.

The relationships and the individual histories were much more interesting to me than the deeper plot (someone’s got a secret!) and I ended the book feeling quite neutral about the whole thing.  This may be a case of not being familiar enough with the game that the story didn’t have much meaning to me. But I also think this is a general problem with books based on games. A book needs a story, a plot. A game needs mechanics and a theme. These are not the same thing and basing a plot on a mechanic just hasn’t seemed to work.

I enjoyed McGuire’s writing but the over-arcing story didn’t grab my attention.

Looking for a good book? Fans of Magic: the Gathering game may really enjoy Seanan McGuire’s Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos – a story based in the Magic: The Gathering world, but general fantasy fans likely won’t find a draw. 

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

3 stars

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Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos

author: Seanan McGuire

series: Magic: The Gathering

publisher:  Random House Worlds

ISBN:  9780593871430

hardcover, 432 pages