Review: The Wizard’s Way by H.P. Holo and Jacob Holo
“The only good wizard is a dead wizard” really doesn’t help when you ARE the wizard!
Welcome to Aurica – a Victorian-style Queenship with a capitol city built into the ancient trees of an equally ancient mountainside. Known as The Iron City, this capitol is a haven for inventors and scientists who hail from the nation of Aurica. These inventors are people who want to investigate everything from electricity to flight to fart bombs. Hey, the sublime cannot be the only thing inventors work on. They might get bigger heads if there weren’t others with less grand ambitions to keep them on their toes!
But Aurica has a policy that makes it the outlier among other nations. It doesn’t like wizards. Male or female, child or adult, a wizard in the city who doesn’t manage to hide is soon dangling from a rope or burning in a public spectacle. Either way, said wizard ends up quite dead.
Seventeen-year-old James Chaucey Thatcher is an inventor trying to make a personal glider he can use to fly.
He is also a wizard with a monster inside of him.
The Story
James Chaucey Thatcher is an orphan from The Caldron, the lowest sector of the Iron City. Swirling with noxious mists, the Caldron is giant pit where orphans and criminals live. No one can tell the difference between them, either, because they are all killing each other as much for sport as over the trash which the Iron City residents cast down upon them. When he was seven, Chaucey attracted the attention of the Queen Aurice’s Grace, a social program that lifts orphan “Calderlings” out of their poverty and tries make them respectable citizens of Aurica.
The program hasn’t gone that well, particularly in Chaucey’s case. Every time he tries to invent something or do something beneficial for the city that will prove he isn’t a criminal-in-waiting, things go wrong and damage ensues. Worse, he still has enough visible signs of malnutrition and a general deportment that passerby recognize him as a “Calderling” on sight. Given that if he fails his upcoming evaluation by the Queen Aurice’s Grace he gets sent back to the Caldron, it is not hard to see why Chaucey is a little desperate to get his latest invention off the ground, somewhat literally.
Chaucey is so desperate, in fact, that he is willing to resort to rather stupid tactics to try to prove his latest invention – a winged personal glider – will work. Unfortunately something again goes wrong with his experiment, and he gets trapped in an electric hansom (tram car). He then must wreck the hansom to save lives, only to realize he used his magic to do it.
Anyone who looks really hard will figure out how Chaucey managed not to kill anyone in this latest disaster. What they cannot know is that, whenever Chaucey’s emotions reach a certain point, his magic manifests as a physical “familiar” – a mechanical lion he named the Steelgore at seven…
...when, in a desperate attempt to protect himself from being burnt alive in an oven, he first unleashed the mechanical lion and it killed twenty boys, plus their adult crime boss.
So not only is Chaucey an inventor, he is a wizard – a very powerful wizard whose skills lie in machining. And he is living smack dab in the center of The Iron City, which is not only full of inventors, it is full of metal. If the Steelgore accidentally gets loose, it will rampage uncontrollably through the capitol. The only two people in on Chaucey’s secret are his inventing mentor, Charles Farwude, and Farwude’s gentleman’s hound Pentalion, an anthropomorphic pugman butler with a strict sense of propriety.
That number gets reduced by one when Farwude is brutally murdered and the city descends into madness hunting the wizard who committed the crime. Now Chaucey has to figure out just what his power is and where he can go to escape this craziness. Because in Aurica, the only good wizard is a dead wizard.
Or so everyone says….
The Characters
Chaucey is a very sympathetic character even when he does something profoundly ill-advised. He is so traumatized by what happened to him in The Caldron that the very idea of going back there sends him into survival mode, which he channels into building something that will show his value to society. What he does not yet realize is that he, as a person, is worth more than anything he could invent. Add to this his desperate need to hide his true nature in Aurica, where if any human citizen sees what he can do, he will be dead – or have to kill again in self-defense – and his behavior makes a sad amount of reasonable sense.
Luckily he has friends who see his worth when he cannot. Elsa, the girl of Chaucey’s dreams, may give him a hard time (particularly after he wrecks her all-electric hansom), but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t like and want to help him. Pentalion would make Alfred Pennyworth proud with his professionalism and brotherly attendance on his young gentleman, though he could stand to relax a hair or two. Both these characters help anchor and steer Chaucey as he seeks answers to the mysteries surrounding him at the same time that he worries about the invisible clock apparently only he can hear ticking down to his doom.
The World
Picture Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist thrown into a world with anthropomorphic animals (bears and dogs for the most part), add a good dose of magic and a lot of Jules Verne-like inventions, sprinkle in a few dragons, and the world of The Wizard’s Way takes shape. The Iron City is center stage for this novel but remains so detailed that waiting for information on the rest of the universe is not frustrating. Rather, it is a good idea – with so much to learn about the city built into the trees, there is not a lot of time to absorb how the rest of the world works!
Politics
None.
Content Warning
People die. Their deaths are not described graphically but they are not pretty nonetheless. Chaucey also appreciates Elsa’s curves and figure, while another female character makes certain to show her own figure off to the fullest extent she can manage in this Victorian setting. Said female character is a wizard with power over flesh, her own and others, which leads to some rather disturbing scenes and more than one nightmare scenario if someone thinks about her abilities too hard. The battle scenes where she gets hurt are not pretty even though they are not described graphically.
Who is it for?
Teens will love this YA novel for sure, and Steampunk fans would be remiss if they didn’t give it a read. Anyone looking for a Victorian era romp in a fantasy world that has more to reveal will also want it, and those seeking a good adventure are in for a treat when they pick up The Wizard’s Way. Lovers of anthropomorphic bears and dogs will enjoy the novel, as will those who want a world with a great deal of depth in it. Boys will enjoy the puzzles and swashbuckling adventure while girls marvel at the societal engineering and wonder just how the protagonist is going to get out of this one. Mecha aficionados will adore the Steelgore and want one of their own, as will cat owners. The ending will have readers clamoring for the sequel, too!
Why buy it?
It is a fun book in a new universe with a believable Steampunk aesthetic. Those are few and far between these days, so why not pick it up and enjoy it?