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Merchant Magician

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Merchant Magician

By: John Champaign
Narrated by: Gus Morgan
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Summary

Exiled from his family of traders in mystical goods and services on his 23rd birthday, the merchant magician must make his way in the world: meeting mermaids in San Francisco, Midwestern leprechauns, Icelandic dwarves and the girl of his dreams, who happens to be a cultist devoted to the rise of the great old ones who will consume the world in ash and fire when they awaken.

Blending real-world negotiation theory with a coming of age story in an urban fantasy setting, this book will appeal to fans of Jim Butcher, Charles de Lint, and Neil Gaiman.

©2021, 2024 John Champaign (P)2025 John Champaign Fantasy Merfolk San Francisco

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Friendship Magician cover art
Friendship Magician By: John Champaign
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This one didn't really grab me. I think the author's other works have been clever, but I think this one tries to be too clever. It mixes myths, legends, gods, and the supernatural into a modern world, but it doesn't do it very effectively. There are way too many not-quite-appropriate pop-culture references, making it seem like an exercise in name dropping. This, together with an inconsistent world, and a whole lot of very dry sales and business stuff (at times it reads like an undergraduate economics textbook) just makes it a slog to get through for too little payoff. There are still some clever ideas, but the main story is just so unappealingly dull that I struggled to complete the book.

Writing quality is good, seeming to have fewer errors than the author's other works.

Audiobook narration is OK, but the narrator's pronunciation is a little slurred / mumbled sometimes. There's an odd pronunciation quirk in the audiobook that I've heard from a different narrator of one of the author's other books, whereby plural possessives are pronounced incorrectly: "Old Ones' " is pronounced "Old Ones's", for example. (This was present in another of the author's audiobooks by a different narrator, however, so it could be a grammatical error rather than a narration problem.) There are very mild vocal changes for character dialogue, rather than full-on character voices. Production quality is mostly good, but there's a weird volume fade towards the end of chapter 11.

After having listened to the author's other audiobooks, I'm disappointed by this one. I'm left feeling unsure if I want to bother with the sequel.

A very dry economics primer mixed with too much pop-culture ruins an interesting premise

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