The first third or so of Magician: Apprentice lulls you into thinking it’s going to be a small story of a young man, Pug, and his titular apprenticeship to become a magician in a fantasy world. But events pickup, the entire world is threatened, and the scope expands rapidly. Events occur in this first book of a series that it’s obvious won’t pay off for books to come (at least, I assume—I haven’t read the rest of the series yet). That’s good if you like grand stories, but a hair frustrating for my favor for compact narrative.

FuzzyCo grade: A-