Sufficiently Advanced Magic

Progression Fantasy is a subgenre that happily draws on video games, anime, and tabletop RPGs as inspiration points. Sufficiently Advanced Magic happily wears its influences on its sleeves. It’s a big magic school story with lots of cool fights, badass moments, without a whole lot mental load required of the reader. And while I think I ultimately prefer Journals of Evander Tailor for my ‘queer kid enchants items in a big magic school’ read, this is a phenomenal option, and definitely the more widely popular one.

Elevator Pitch:
Corin enters the Spire hoping for many things: an attunement to grant him magic, clues about the fate of his brother, who vanished years ago in his own Spire trial, and maybe a fun magic weapon or two. He comes out with all three things (though perhaps none as intended), the attention of one of the immortal Visages who can destroy countries with a thought, and a pissed off abusive father who can’t stand his son got an enchanting attunement instead of one designed for combat. Corin heads to school, hoping to develop his abilities to eventually be able to find his brother and gain independence.

What Worked for Me
This is probably one of my favorite books that has traditional dungeon-crawl style story beats. Yes it’s a tower, not a dungeon, but really what’s the difference. There are puzzles, cool fights, traps, and lots of secrets! Rowe manages to find a good balance of how much mindless dungeon crawling a reader can engage with before needing to inject some overarching plot into the mix, and I never felt bored.

Corin himself is a lot of fun. He’s a classic socially awkward kid, but Rowe does a great job of justifying this with Corin’s history with an abusive father who pulled him from school for years to train in dueling, and engaging with that concept in earnest (if perhaps the not the most nuanced) ways, instead of just sweeping things under the rug. He’s also a great example of what casual asexuality can look like in books (jury is still out on his romantic inclinations). It wasn’t a huge deal, and characters are mostly chill about the situation, though his adoptive sister definitely pokes fun more than Corin would like her to.

In a magic school story, the magic is going to be critically important to how a reader enjoys it. I liked the highly formulaic nature of how magic is understood, with characters being granted powers in the spires that fit various roles. Enchanters make items. Guardians have powerful physical combat abilities. Summoners bond with sassy magic gargoyles. That sort of thing. It works really well for the video game aesthetic the book is aiming for. You’re either going to love it and indulge in the references, or you’re going to absolutely despise it and be constantly annoyed.

What Didn’t Work for Me
My biggest concern with the series at this point are the tie-ins with Rowe’s other series. A fairly major side character is the lead in many of Rowe’s other books, and has big main character energy. He also doesn’t fit into any of the magic systems that Rowe has established so far. I think I’d rather the story stay limited in scope to Corin’s goals and part of the world, since I don’t find the master swordsman an interesting enough character to go read his stuff. If the stories start to converge too much, I could see my enjoyment dropping off a bit.

The book also requires a good amount of suspension of disbelief. Corin gets involved way over his head a lot, with powers that by all rights should be killing him simply by nudging him on accident. While tackling challenges over one’s head is a classic hallmark of the progression fantasy genre I love, the power differential is really extreme right now, to the point that sometimes I have to put a lot of effort into turning off any sort of analytical voice in the back of my head.

In Conclusion: a Final Fantasy-esque magic school story. If that sounds fun, this is for you!

• Characters – 4
• Worldbuilding – 3
• Craft – 3
• Themes – 3
• Enjoyment – 4