The Accidental Sorcerer: Split personality

The Accidental Sorcerer by K.E. Mills

The Accidental Sorcerer is the first book in the Rogue Agent trilogy by K.E. Mills, a pseudonym of the author Karen Miller.

Gerald Dunwoody is a “Third Grade” wizard who has been failing at one job after another. After he loses his job as a magical inspector for the government, he takes a job as Royal Wizard for the kingdom of New Ottosland. And that’s where the story really starts to get interesting.

K.E. Mills has a gift for descriptive writing. Her characters were all physical presences in the story. She also manages to write realistic sounding dialog. Though a few of the plot twists were fairly obvious, the final conflict between Dunwoody and the King was well written, and showed the growth of Dunwoody’s character from a failing naive wizard to a major magical being struggling to take responsibility for the consequences of his failures and magical power. Mills manages to mix interesting characters with consistently paced action to create a story that reads quite quickly.

The Accidental Sorcerer starts out feeling like a farcical romp of a tale, as if PG Wodehouse had decided to turn Wooster into a magician. Then half way through, the book turns into a fairly serious story of the corrupting influence of ambition and black magic. This left the novel feeling like it had a split personality. Both parts were well done separately, but together they had a rather jarring effect. I spent the second half of the book waiting for it to get funny again. It almost felt like Mills had changed her mind about how she wanted to write the book, and then didn’t go back and change the first half of the novel. The bad editing also irritated me. At one point, an entire paragraph was repeated.

Mills has a good story here, and the end of The Accidental Sorcerer sets up the rest of the trilogy. Assuming that the writing at the end of the novel sets the tone for the rest of the trilogy, it seems that Mills has created a world where she can explore serious issues of responsibility and power in a relatively light setting. Though this shouldn’t be mistaken for serious, heavy fantasy, it is a good romp of a tale, and the intriguing cast of characters makes me willing to pick up the next book in the trilogy to see what mess they will get into next.