Firstly, I don’t particularly enjoy reading about real historical people but fictionalised. That nixed any chance of me liking his fictional representation and definitely nixed any chance of me liking this book.īut beyond the boredom, there were some other aspects I didn’t really like. I was so bored by this book that, halfway through, I went and googled William Wilberforce, only to find out he had a direct hand in the creation of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, themselves a big player in the raids on molly houses in the 19th century. It was well-written, but dense and so bogged down in the details, I couldn’t even effectively skim-read it. It’s not like it was badly written either, so I couldn’t just blame my boredom on not getting along with the writing. It was, quite frankly, one of the most boring books I’ve ever had to drag myself through. That, and the fact that it spans so many years before we even get to the crux of the plot (which is only just revealed right at the end of the book, besides), and in those years, what do we get? Literally just intensely detailed political manoeuverings, a million minutiae on how exactly the very tiniest details of the world had changed. And I’m supposed to believe that, under conditions so drastically different from our own, there would be the exact same history unfolding in the exact same way?Īnd, honestly, that’s what made it most boring to me. Not to mention there’s a good two millenia plus of development before all this supposedly takes place. I don’t know about you, but I’d have thought that, in a world with magic, history would not happen to unfurl in exactly the same manner as our world. About the only thing that changed about it was exact motivations for things.

But when I say “almost exact retelling”, I do mean it quite literally.

Now, you might think that doesn’t sound so bad. I was quickly disillusioned, and then dragged myself through the rest of the book, in the vain hope that something might actually happen.Ī Declaration of the Rights of Magicians is an almost exact retelling of history as we know it, but with vampires, necromancers, and other magic users.

I say 500, because for the first 50 or so pages, I thought I might be interested in it.

This book, for me, was approximately 500 pages of boredom. CWs: graphic descriptions of slavery, gore, murder

A declaration of rights of magicians