Review: The Late Great Wizard

The Late Great Wizard by Sara Hanover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Sara Hanover's debut is a fun story. It's chock full of magic and adventure and betrayals and a big scary villain. It's got ghosts and spirits and dwarves and phoenix wizards and magical relics. It's one of those books that I just expected to fall in love with.

Unfortunately, the book felt... incomplete, unfinished, lacking something. The plot was all over the place, and some of the events felt forced or shoved into the story just to have an exciting moment rather than making sense for the story overall.

I definitely think she was setting up a series, because this book spends 75% of the book or so setting up the main series villain before making a sharp turn into "here's the villain of THIS book" territory. It spent the rest of the book focusing on that before swapping back to the main villain after the climax.

Basically the dialogue and banter felt a little forced, the relationships weren't overly believable (I mean she knew them all of like a day before she cared deeply for all of them?), and the plot was kinda messy. It felt like part of a bigger story that was left unfinished. It *felt* like setup, world building, without any of the payoffs of it being a complete story on its own that just happened to also setup more.

I gave it three stars (more like two and a half rounded up) because I like the world she created and all the fun types of magic, and because I think she has potential, but if there's a book two, it's going to need to show major growth over this one for me to continue past that.

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