15 ratings | 2 reviews | avg rating: 3.67

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Shelly Mazzanoble

goodreads author profile

url

http://www.goodreads.com/shellymoo

born

February 01, 1972

gender

female

member since

August 2007

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books by Shelly Mazzanoble

avg rating: 3.42 | 119 ratings | 42 reviews | 1 distinct work | 1 fan

Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game
by Shelly Mazzanoble (Goodreads author)
avg rating 3.42 — 118 ratings — published 2007

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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, perform a search.

Shelly's recent updates (rss)

April 01

Shelly gave

to:
The Knitting Circle: A Novel (Hardcover)
by Ann Hood

my rating:

read in April, 2009

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March 29

Shelly marked as to-read:
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (Paperback)
by Ruth Reichl

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Shelly gave

to:
We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive (Paperback)
by Laurie Notaro

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read in March, 2009

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Shelly gave

to:
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands (Paperback)
by Chelsea Handler

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March 17

Shelly read and liked Richard's review of Agents of Artifice (Magic: The Gathering: Planeswalker, #1):

"Agents of Artifice is a book made of win and awesome and you should all go buy it.

I’ll elaborate. I’m not a big Magic: The Gathering player, so I am not immediately familiar with the famous figures and places of the M:TG universe. Age...more Agents of Artifice is a book made of win and awesome and you should all go buy it.

I’ll elaborate. I’m not a big Magic: The Gathering player, so I am not immediately familiar with the famous figures and places of the M:TG universe. Agents of Artifice is an excellent introduction to the Magic universe without drowning you in needless detail.

Author Ari Marmell, curse his hide, comes up with dazzlingly brilliant ideas that make me want to download his brain for game design purposes. The story centers on a group of mercenary planeswalkers and their new recruit. The characterizations do a nice job of avoiding fantasy stereotypes, creating, for the most part, fully realized people with a variety of motivations, both good and ill. If the story sometimes skimps on details to the point of sparseness (the organization that is at the heart of the book remains very nebulous throughout the story), that becomes a plus in my mind as it presents the very real dilemmas inherent in taking on such shadowy organizations. Too often the big bad guys in fantasy stories are so obvious and monolithic, you expect them to have office space on main street. Here such problems are artfully avoided and used to make the organization more troublesome without making the antagonists overly powerful in the process. He also makes excellent use of a few key plot swerves, some coming upon the reader and the protagonist simultaneously, some used to help build tension.

It also helps that his writing is just fun to read. Ari makes better use of the English language than a great many fantasy authors, both in description and in dialogue. His descriptions are evocative and paint excellent pictures of the fantastic buildings and cities of his setting. His description of an artificer’s lair is enough to make me declare that he’s taken far more than his fair share of creativity and needs to return some for the rest of us. He depicts the magical battles between planeswalkers in a way that makes me want to go out and play Magic, building decks around his principal characters. His writing of martial combat is quick and evocative without endless descriptions of this maneuver or that, which makes it read more like an actual fight would look.

If I were to quibble over anything, it would be the use of the story’s protagonist, Jace Beleren. Jace comes across to me as Luke Skywalker if Luke had first encountered Palpatine rather than Obi-Wan. While the plot does keep moving, it moves using the same formula repeatedly:

1) Jace resists making a decision or taking an action, bemoaning his fate
2) A crisis erupts
3) Jace takes said action or makes said decision

While I understand the need for crisis moments to help ratchet up the tension, I got the sense through the book that Jace was not going to ever do much of anything without a crisis moment to force his hand. He reminded me of an RPG protagonist – spending most of his time reacting rather than acting and very rarely planning for anything other than subsistence.

In attempting to make the hero of the story an atypical sort of non-hero, I think the author goes a bit too far, making him unsympathetic. By the time the book was about half over, I found that I didn’t really care whether Jace met a grisly fate for his actions or not and I cared more about fairly incidental characters than anyone who spent a great deal of time "on screen." I kept reading because Ari’s ideas are clever and the writing is fun, but I just found that I didn’t care that much what happened to the main characters, especially as their behavior seemed to do the most damage to those in their proximity.

But those are really minor points in what is an excellent book. It’s a nice quick read that I finished in a single day (mostly thanks to a flight I had to take) and beats the hell out of much of the fantasy fiction that comes out in support of this game or that. So go get your own!(less) "

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