The Accidental Sorcerer (K E Mills, Voyager, $24.99 tpb, ISBN 9780732286040, April) ***

The Accidental Sorcerer is the first book in Mills’ fantasy series ‘Rogue Agent’. Twenty-three-year-old Gerald Dunwoody is a Grade Three Wizard—the bottom of the pecking order, magically speaking. He’s also the scapegoat for a catastrophically expensive mess at his public service job, making him a nobody and out of work. His companion, an enchanted raven, is convinced that there’s more to Gerald than appears, however; and when Gerald, in desperation, takes up a post in the isolated kingdom of New Ottosland, as court wizard to the kingdom’s charismatic but dangerously ambitious king, she may be proved right—if either of them can survive the experience. This starts as comic fantasy, with a subtler edge to the humour than you often see in the genre, which I found refreshing. About halfway through, however, it acquires a more serious tone, as the stakes become death and betrayal, rather than the public humiliation of the opening chapters. While I was enthralled enough by the story that I was kept reading when the tone changed, I found the lighter, funnier beginning more engaging, and more original, than the high-stakes sword and sorcery adventure that the book became.

Jarrah Moore works for the Global Books in Print database at Thorpe-Bowker

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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