This one took me a few tries to get all the way through. Ever since I picked it up I wanted to like it and it just resisted letting me in. There's an interesting story in there but it's buried under so much technical and dry information that it's hard to hold onto. ( )

Medieval steampunk, before there was such a thing. Way too much time on technical jargon (it's called magic, but really this is an SF story from a medieval viewpoint). And falling in love with an image? Really of it time too. Well enough written but almost all plot and emotion is overwhelmed with details. ( )

This was a very pleasant surprise, and comes close to 5 stars for me.

The beginning felt like Dungeons and Dragons before D&D had been invented, and then turned into surprising territory. It's a quest, I guess, but the quest is to find ingredients and then create something, which feels fresh, and the tone is not so serious but also not overly comic--it's striking that delicate balance and staying in the middle ground which is more to my taste.

It's an intelligently-written, refreshing book. ( )

Loads of fun vocabulary ( )

What a strange little book. I don't think I've ever read something quite like it, although the ease with which every now and then some obscure esoteric medieval manuscript is cited did remind me of Umberto Eco - more Baudolino though than any other of Eco's books. A handful of magical creatures as well, just like in Baudolino. But here I think the similarities stop - The Phoenix and the Mirror is through and through a fantasy novel, with a wizard as a main protagonist but a totally different breed of wizard than what we usually get. A hard-working nerdy wizard, you see him struggling and you get inside his head and all that knowledge of his is shared with the reader. And the wizard is Virgil, the Roman poet, this inspired by medieval legends by which Virgil was a great magician, possibly immortal. ( )