Magyk - Angie Sage
by Zia ~ August 15th, 2006. Filed under: Books.
Should I be embarrassed at the sheer number of kid books on the blog lately? Probably — but I think children’s literature is more consistently good than literary fiction. Sure, there’s some good stuff out there, but I am getting more and more disgusted with a lot of the pretentious garbage that masquerades as literary highbrow. With kid’s books (and romance novels!), you know where you stand: they don’t purport to be anything more than what they are. I think kids have higher standards than adults in a lot of ways — and they’re a lot harder to fool into thinking something’s good when it’s not.
And Magyk was good. At birth, Silas Heap is spirited away from his magical family and a little girl is found and brought home. Fast forward ten years and magicians are persecuted, the missing princess is found in the Heap family, and Silas, who is the seventh son of a seventh son (and therefore very magical) is somehow helping an evil wizard take over the world. Except, of course, that he’s really not … Lovely, filled with weird and wonderful characters.