Dad Magic

I picked up this book excited for an urban fantasy with a middle-aged gay parent as a protagonist. It’s about everything you could expect from a book called Dad Magic, and features a lot of elements I don’t normally see in fantasy (urban or not). Ultimately, I didn’t like this book terribly much, and wish that I had DNF’d it. I think there’s a lot of readers who would like it though, especially if they can get into the dad-bod jokes that exemplify the tone of this story.

Elevator Pitch:
Brent is a retired adventurer, now insurance claims worker. He sells products in case his clients get blown up by their own cauldrons or get run over by a drunk driver on a broom. He lives with his 17 year old daughter who wants to work with dragons (not Brent’s favorite idea in the world) and his best friend who eats way too much chicken cooked with time magic. After the pair of friends are forced to defend a city block from a violent behemoth, they get roped into working for the mage’s guild to investigate strange events in the city. At the same time, his daughter is coming to terms with her unique powers, a man who looks just like his ex-husband shows up, and people start hunting down Victoria for reasons yet-unknown.

What Worked for Me
Despite not loving this story, I want to highlight that Pax and Brent’s relationship as something I really enjoyed. There was a level of ribbing and banter that felt very familiar to me as someone who enjoys that type of relationship in my real life. Queer men have always had platonic friendships with each other, but we don’t see that often in writing, because they’re shoehorned into romantic partnerships almost universally. This was a refreshing change of pace. Sadly, that’s about the only positive that’s staying with me a few days after finishing the story.

What Didn’t Work For Me
Ultimately, I think I didn’t buy into the tone and writing enough to enjoy this story properly. The world is filled with renaming of things to fit into a magitech world (for example, camera + chimera turns into CAM-mera). References to KFC and reality TV shows all sort of make sense for the corny urban fantasy vibe the author is going for, but I found their inclusion to be more distracting than immersive. This was doubly true since I didn’t find much of the magic to be particularly novel or interesting, leaving me feeling like a book focused so much on the blending of magic and technology left it very unexplored.

I also had a lot of issues with the pacing of the book on both a macro level, and on a scene by scene basis. There was a lot of establishing something new, then immediately resolving it via discussion or combat. There were long term-plot threads of course, but I ended up feeling like most individual scenes didn’t have tension because in ten pages nothing that happened would matter anymore. This ‘establish/resolve’ loop extended to the romance components as well (though I did authentically enjoy Victoria’s romance plotline), where I couldn’t buy into the developing relationship between Brent and the hot supervisor at the Mage Guild, because I was being told that flirting and chemistry was happening without ever feeling it in my bones. Both story and characters felt shallow and overdeveloped for the impact it ended up having. It was like everyone was moving on puppet strings.

In the end, I think the bottom line is that the writing style didn’t work for me, which tanked any enjoyment I could have had in the story and characters. As is, I can appreciate that this was a labor of love and a debut novel, but not one I plan on continuing on to book 2. It’s a good lesson that I need to get better at dropping books I’m not enjoying, because it’s not doing me, you, or the author any favors. Lots of others have loved this though, so check out the other goodsreads reviews for differing opinions from mine.

In Conclusion: an urban fantasy book filled with corny jokes and references, but that suffered from pacing and prose issues to the point that killed my enjoyment.

• Characters: 2
• Worlbuilding: 3
• Craft: 2
• Themes: 2
• Enjoyment: 2