“Magician’s Merger”, is an interesting story of an 11-year old boy remembering he was once a 1000-year old wizard.  Artie, the 11-year old, wakes up to find himself in a hospital with two sets of memories.  He has his own, plus that of a 1000-year old wizard named Ursus.  Artie finds out that after coming down with chicken pox he fell into some kind of deep sleep that the doctors still can’t explain.  Despite the lack of diagnosis, they let him go home where he starts doing the homework he missed while ill.

Right from the beginning Artie seems awfully mature and articulate for a grade 6 student.  He notices the nurse is “stacked”, which may be normal, but he also describes his Mom as “well built” which is kind of creepy.  Once Ursus starts talking, the kid’s maturity makes a bit more sense but I thought the other kids came across as a bit articulate as well, especially Artie’s 4 younger siblings.  It made the dialog seem a bit stilted.

The idea behind the “Magician’s Merger” is really intriguing, and there are some really interesting passages, but after reading 9 chapters (about 25k words), there really isn’t much of a story.  There’s a lot of detailed description of people, places and things–almost every new character gets at least one paragraph of description.  Artie describes his bike, he describes each member of his family . . . it comes across as very clinical and distant, especially since the writing is in first person.  The wizard takes several paragraphs to describe how he came to be in Artie’s head. 

Actually, that was another problem for me: the voice the story is written in.  I understand that there are two personalities here but I was often confused as to “who” was speaking.  The two (three?) voices didn’t seem very different.  I couldn’t tell Artie and Ursus apart just from their speech patterns.  I expected a 1000-year old magician to speak at least a little differently than an 11-year old boy.

There is a lot of potential for humour or tension in the situation, but nothing seems to develop.  It’s all told so matter-of-factly, with Artie accepting everything so easily, that it’s hard to find anything to react to.  Artie seems like a nice, fairly smart kid but no one around him seems to notice that his speech and mannerisms have changed.  If they do notice anything he just reminds them he’s been sick and they seem to accept this.

I found “Magician’s Merger” interesting but not very involving.  It’s an idea with a lot of potential but I couldn’t really get myself to care about the characters.  If you like lots of detail and description, you might want to check it out.  If you like action, adventure or humour, though, you might want to look elsewhere.

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I think my first thought when I read this was something along the lines of, What, he’s eleven years old?  He sure doesn’t sound eleven years old.

Which is, of course, easily explained since the magician is so much older than an eleven year old boys.

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