A School for Sorcery by E. Rose Sabin: The Ending

A School for Sorcery 

by 

E. Rose Sabin

Can I just complain about the cover I got! Seriously! Look at the cover above (which is what convinced me to look for the book in the first place). Now look at the cover my Library had.

What the heck! How did you guys screw up do bad?

Okay, okay rant over let’s get to the actual book.

Alright so there’s a Victorian-esque world with trains, cars, and the occasional steam powered device but the real kicker is that there is also magic. Tria is a farm girl who, of course, has magic. In probably the first four or five pages she gets accepted to a school for magic that sounds amazing! But then arrives to find a rundown campus with maybe thirty students.

Now the first part of the book is mostly Tria struggling to learn the rules of the magical world and avoid her frankly terrible roommate. So basically the first semester of college.

The real plot starts later (And it’s in the blurb! So don’t yell at me about spoilers) when two of the students, who are basically drunk on their own power, trap two of the nice but weaker kids in some sort of terrifying dimension. Yeah said dimension was never really explained so . . . Now It’s Tria’s job for (some reason) to get the two students back and she has a year to do it.

 So I’ve been intentionally looking for books like Dealing with Dragons or, well, anything by Patricia C. Wrede or Caroline Stevermer. “A School for Sorcery” was sort of advertised as such authors combined with J. K. Rowling. Which I can . . . kind of see. But really only the magic school bit.

 Anyway on to the characters.

Characters

Tria: She was kind of the normal fairytale-ish main character. 

Polite and earnest but not always the brightest. Still when she did screw up she took her punishment with an impressive amount of grace.

 So while she wasn’t my favorite character ever I still found her perfectly entertaining and in the narrative she worked quite well.

Lina: She’s this one character that started out being a jerk for no reason and then mostly became Tria’s friend. Well I say friend. More like an ally. Lina was this character who was totally entitled but she was much cleverer than Tria and actually lead her to the solution of most of her problems so she was at least useful if not nice. But hey she could turn into a panther so . . . That's always cool!

Wilce and Gray: These were the two students who got trapped in who knows where. Despite not having a lot of time with them they were both extremely sweet. I have to admit that I was actually very invested in saving them because they were just that cute.

Oryon: He became the main antagonist by trapping Wilce and Gray and then challenging the Headmistress to save them or she would turn the school over to him. Now I have to admit that at first I really did not see his motivation. It seemed like he just wanted revenge against Tria and Lina for ticking him off earlier in the narrative. But as the story unfolded I saw that it was really about his fight with the Headmistress, who was a total hypocrite and I can see why. As an antagonist he actually got pretty creepy which surprised me.

Likes

The romance: What can I say, the romance between Tria and Wilce (while mainly geared towards making you feel for Wilce) was so cutesy. I mean sure it was short and pretty one-dimensional but maybe I was just glad that I didn’t have to complain about how unhealthy and illogical it was.

Oops

The setting: Like I said I have been intentionally seeking out books with technology and magic because I’m a sucker for those kind of worlds. Though I would have liked to see more of the technology. The school was kind of in the middle of nowhere so while I knew that such a world existed I didn’t really get to see it.

Basically everything up until the end: Sure there was some confusing things and several frustrating parts. But it was essentially a run of the mill magical adventure (contained in a mysterious school that looked rundown at times and at other times looked beautiful) except for the ending. I’ll talk about it in my dislikes but holy cow it’s like it exploded with ‘what the HECK’ moments in the last fifty pages.

Dislikes

The staff: Okay I’ve seen complaints of the Hogwarts staff and their inability to help Harry and co. on their epic quest. They’ve got nothing on the staff in this book. Mostly it’s the Headmistress’s fault. She is a fraud. She’s got this high and mighty attitude about how she’s so powerful and she knows so much more than everyone else but in reality she can barely control her less powerful students much less all of them together. So when Oryon called her out for being a liar and frankly just a jerk she was supposed to fold right then and there. But instead she passed the task onto Tria and Lina saying that it would unfair for someone as powerful as herself to accept Oryon’s challenge. 

She even forbade the other teachers from helping them. Now I expected her to get called out in the end you know Percy Jackson style. But Nope! Which leads to the rest of the ending.

The Ending

 Probably the last forty pages when right into what the heck mode. For example, in an attempt to increase her power with some kind of mirror trick Tria accidentally split herself up into four different versions of herself. 

  Which was confusing to say the least. After an equally confusing romp into the super scary dimension to retrieve the other two students it is then revealed that Tria is a seventh level adept. Which is the highest level a person can achieve, surprise, surprise. Now what does that make her? A god. A literal god. 

The book ended with her making an entire world out of dust. What the Heck!? That ending just made no sense none at all.

I don’t even really know how to conclude. It was just a bit too convoluted for my taste. I do really love the genre that’s a slow paced magical adventure (a la Raven Boys or Dealing with Dragons) but I feel like those work because they’re highly character driven with in depth and often amazing main characters and co. I have to say that ‘amazing’ would probably be a stretch for these characters. So I guess I did like it (well up until the end).