Reviews

Well this one took me entirely by surprise! I don't know the author, I've never heard of this book, but the description sounded fun and the title really spoke to me, so here I am. And I don't regret a thing. This is why I love reading debuts.
"Notorious Sorcerer" tells the story of street urchin and amateur practicioner of alchemy Siyon, mostly hopping the different planes of existence to gather material to sell to actual alchemists. When he accidentally shows real magical potential while very publicly saving a friend's life, he draws the attention of not just known alchemists, but also their enemies.
"Notorious Sorcerer" is plain fun - charming, funny, sweet, exciting, full of loveable characters. Siyon is a rather typical unlikely hero, but he's so charming it doesn't even matter. Most of the chapters are written from his perspective, although there are a bunch of other pov characters - the sisters Zagiri and Anahid being my favourites and I hope they will be focused on even more in the sequel. The only character I didn't quite warm up to is Izmirlian, a noble on his very own adventure and love interest of our protagonist. I very much loved their romance, but the character itself was never allowed to truly reveal his depths. The villains were also a little too on the nose and onedimensional. though I enjoyed certain reveals happening later on.

The plot is exciting and the pacing admittedly very fast. There are rarely any quiet scenes to take a breath and reflect on events happening, which does take away some potential for more character interactions and development. It also made it very difficult for me to put this book down, which is not a bad thing unless I have to get up early in the morning. The ending also hit me right in the feels, which I wasn't expecting. I also enjoyed the focus on classicm and structural class differences, so next to all the fluff and fun there's always an underlying seriousness, giving the whole book more weight. Now, the politics involved are not very complex but this is not political fantasy as such, so it didn't dampen my enjoyment at all.

The potential for a sequel is there, but I really think this works well as a standalone too. So I can easily recommend this to readers who don't necessarily want to start a new series as well. All in all: great debut, awesome story, loveable characters, go read this!

Many thanks to Orbit and Netgalley for the arc!

eleeeeleelee's review

Go to review page

adventurous slow-paced

3.0

I actually really liked the plot overall as well as the world and the depth of the characters. However it was really scattered writing in parts that made it harder to follow. The world building was poorly explained and I didn’t quite understand the society until about halfway through. I also thought this is a classic example of what people critique about the fantasy genre- overly complex for little reason and poor explanation. Also the author tried to tackle issues of racism and classism through the fantasy lens (always a messy choice)- which led them to being poor representation of those issues.