Interesting and different book, i enjoyed the whole thing!

Sorcery for Beginners is formatted as a textbook, so that the reader can learn magic along with Owen. Owen's story is presented as a case study, demonstrating the practicalities and possible pitfalls of learning magic, and the values expected of magical candidates. Accompanying the case study there are instructions for spells, diagrams, and tidbits of trivia. It's a brilliant way of presenting a classic good versus evil story in a refreshing way.
The plot is action-packed with plenty of excitement to keep you reading. The prose is lively and accessible, the characters engaging and relatable, especially Owen and Perry. I particularly enjoyed the imaginative spell casting, which combines some sort of Tai Chi-inspired somatic movements with magical objects and incantations in various languages.
There were a number of formatting issues in the kindle edition I read, which I understand have now been resolved.
Overall, a hugely enjoyable read, ideal for fans of Eoin Colfer and Lemony Snicket

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Owen is a fairly average thirteen-year-old. He thinks so too. When his parents separate and he moves to a new school, things start to get stressful. While escaping a bunch of bullies, Owen ends up in a book store and receives a guide to magic. It seems pretty hard—he has to actually practice and work up to things—but he's determined and is soon using spells for his own purpose. His goal is to get his parents back together. But things don't stay smooth, and soon he finds himself caught up in a magical war, where he and his new found friends must save the book and maybe the world.

This is a very clever dive into a magical tale. It's built up like a text book, but at the same time, reveals Owen's exciting story and experiences. There are footnotes and other notations, which add lovely little tidbits. . .some quite funny. . .which help avoid information dumps an insure that the reader receives the things they need to know. As Owen discovers magic, so does the reader. And it's exactly this format which is not only engaging but a delight to read.

Owen is average, and he sees himself that way too. He isn't exactly a hard worker, but when something is important enough to him (like find the right spell), he does put forth the effort. Readers will have no trouble sympathizing with him and will see some of themselves reflected in him. His friends are a sheer delight, each so different from the other. While Owen's story drives the main plot, his friends aren't forgotten and have their own problems which need to be solved. This gives the book just the right amount of depth, and several interesting layers as well. This group also makes sure that Owen does sit as the only capable character, but rather lets the balance of friendship and working together shine through.

Imagination fills this story as Owen discovers the world of magic. Some questions surrounding the magical world are left open, but most of the story wraps up in a lovely end. There's never a boring moment, but then, with the illustrations and other notations, there's always something to look forward to. Even the plot is not easy to predict and maintains a quick pace until the end.

Summed up, this is an entertaining read which is sure to grab the interest of young fantasy and magic friends.

Matt Harry is a genius. I’m always looking for the next sorcery, wizards and magical fix. This is it.

In Sorcery for Beginners, Harry produces a ‘dummies’ guide to learning sorcery laced within the story of Owen Macready, a thirteen year old, looking to change his past. The book follows the teenager as he fumbles through the world of magic with his new friends attempting to unlock the power of sorcery. The Euclideans, a technology-based, matrix-style antagonist set on removing magic from the world work perfectly when set in Las Vegas.

What makes this brilliant is it isn’t your typical magic book. Although a good read for her fans, this is much more than a re-hash of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Matt Harry’s modern way of approaching magic and sorcery makes this a delightful read. The writing style is perfect for a middle-grade or early young adult audience and interesting enough for adults to enjoy. The plot is fast paced. You have developed, funny characters, Perry is a personal favourite of mine, that you care about. The illustrations make this a polished package. Thankfully, this book is in the perfect place to become a series and one that you will want to read. It will be surprising if bemused adults don’t spend the next six months watching children across the world practising magical movements and speaking Latin.

I wish I could be a young again so this book can be part of my childhood.

This book was AWESOME! It's been a while since my last middle-grade book, so I admit, it took me a while to get into the proper mindset for it. Once I hit that point, however, I flew through this book in one sitting.

A mostly accurate summary:
The adventures of five D&D playing middle schoolers and one average 13-year-old boy as they discover a book on sorcery.

A slightly longer summary:
The story begins with Owen Macready, a Perfectly Average 13-year-old whose parents have recently divorced. To restart, Owen and his father move to Las Vegas. One day, after rescuing a boy from bullies after school and consequently, getting chased by them, Owen finds himself in front of Codex Arcanum Bookstore as he searches for a place to hide. He ends up purchasing Sorcery for Beginners, a guide to magic and is thrust into a world of sorcerers and their mortal enemies, the Euclideans, a pro-technology group dedicated to wiping out sorcery. Initially, I was worried that with this premise, the conflict of this book would strictly be technology vs magic. I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong and both sides come up with very creative ways to mix magic and science together.

I like the direction Sorcery for Beginners took with its characters. As an adult reading a middle-grade book, it's evident that not all these characters are realistic depictions of middle schoolers. Perry has a larger vocabulary than most college students, Trish has an inhumanly high CON stat, Owen couldn't possibly be out-pacing a car on a bike, etc. But taking into account the target audience of this book, these exaggerations work. They give middle schoolers a sense of empowerment that only books can. I can say with confidence that had I read this book as a child, Perry would have definitely encouraged me to spend the next couple hours reading a dictionary, attempting to increase my own vocabulary. I also appreciated the diversity in the characters. Of Owen's friends, Perry is black, Trish is Korean-American, and Ravi is Indian. Even the one of the bullies (or Cro-Magnons), Abu, is likely not white. While the race of these characters never impacted the story, it was nice to see the representation.

The most unique aspect of this book is its format. This book is written as a textbook, introducing the reader to sorcery through the story of Owen & friends. Similar to most introductory textbooks, this book comes with illustrations, boxes offering snarky tidbits of the objects mentioned in the story, and most importantly, pages instructing spell casting! This includes any necessary materials, verbal components, step by step instructions, and most importantly, hand gestures. You can bet I was gesturing along to each spell I ran into as I read. The verbal components are pulled from a variety of different languages, but there are helpful pronunciation guides for those of us who aren't polyglots.

The only part I disliked was the use of slang. Often times it felt very out of place and, especially with the intentionally misspelled text messages, cringey. Granted, as someone who is not a middle schooler, I'm not up-to-date with current middle-schooler slang.

Overall, I rate this book a 5/5. Sorcery for Beginners was a fun read and I look forward to the sequel!

One final question for the author. Since the field of transmutation was brought up and used in this book, I must ask: Could one transmute antimatter?

This was a quick and interesting read. A 13-year-old boy Owen is having a hard time after his parents' separation, and his mom leaving him, which results in him and his father having to move to Las Vegas. Troubles seem to end when Owen finds an unexpected solution in the form of a "Spell to rewrite history" in a magical book he bought, but unfortunately for him the troubles have just begun.

The most interesting thing for me is that this novel was actually made in the form of a textbook/guide to sorcery, with sidebars with additional "info" on magic, magical people and events. The plot was entertaining and easy to follow, but there were some things that bothered me and the result is a 3-star rating.

First of all, I know this is a middle-grade novel, and I knew that before reading, but it's too childish in some events. The kiddie slang may be interesting to kids (if they really talk like that today, yuck), but for me it lowered the plot's value. Second, the illustrations were ugly and anatomically incorrect. Being a children's book illustrator, I love to read children's books/comics, to keep myself up to date and to explore fresh ideas, and I know the differences between cartoons, caricatures and realistic drawings. The illustrator who did this has pretty low knowledge on anatomy, perspective and general appeal. If you're not well versed in anatomy, like myself, you should explore other styles of drawing which are less realistic. On the contrary, the spell and chapter pages were pretty nice. And my third and last remark is a technical one - on my kindle version many words overlapped, every "th" in each word was replaced with a tiny circle, the text went out of the frames in sidebars, and some other layout errors made this copy hard to read. I had a computer copy too, but I can't read on the computer.
All in all, an interesting book, but aimed to kids only.

Thanks to NetGalley and to the editor. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had some problems with the layout of my copy, I do not know if it was a problem of my ereader or if it's not edited well, but it's an ARC so it's ok, I just hope that they would fix it in the regular copies if it's not a problem of mine.

Anyway, the idea of this book is great and also the format, the author chose to mix a fiction book and a textbook, and the result is good (layout problem not standing). And the story is entertaining and funny, I liked it, but I was hoping for something more. I think that a younger reader would enjoy this book a lot, because it's fun, entertaining and not demanding. And Owen is a good main character. He's a boy who thinks about himself like average, his grades are average, his look is average, he doesn't possess outstanding sports skill and so on... but every one of us is special, in a way or another, and this book helps us understand it. And it's also about friendship and about the importance of hard work to obtain results.
It's not a bad book, but I am not a younger reader and I was expecting more. Parental figures are almost nonexistent and there some things that are quite... unlikely, and that it's not ok for me.
Another thing that was bugging me during the reading was that the author calls the three kids that are the main characters of this story "the eight graders" a lot, and I mean a lot!

Anyway, it's not a bad reading, it's fun and entertaining.

Pure fun! Matt Harry you have a real talent for imagination. Loved this story and I think middle-graders or really, any fan of Harry Potter, will love it. It's a magical adventure that kept me fascinated throughout. Owen ducked into a bookstore when he ran from some bullies. While there he purchases a book called Sorcery for Beginners and met Euphemia Whitmore who tells him about the war between practitioners of magic and the Euclideans who want to destroy it. Owen, through studying the book and learning spells, becomes embroiled in this war. I can feel more books coming continuing Owen's adventures - at least I hope so!

Thanks so much to Matt Harry and Inkshares through Netgalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

3.5/ 5

I really enjoyed this book. It was great! Magic and a school setting! Very reminiscent of Harry Potter but still its own story!

To escape some bullies, 13-year-old Owen Macready dashes into a book store that seems to have appeared suddenly out of nowhere. The proprietor sells him a rare book titled Sorcery for Beginners, a how-to manual for would-be sorcerers. She also tells him about a centuries-old war between practitioners of magic and those who would destroy it. As if it’s not bad enough that he is now the target of a bunch of magic hating baddies, when he uses his new-found skills against the bullies, he puts himself and his friends into the sights of a millionaire who wants the book for his own nefarious purposes.

Sorcery for Beginners: A Simple Help Guide to a Challenging & Arcane Art by author Matt Harry and with illustrations by Juliane Crump is a fun read aimed at Middle Graders. However, although there is plenty of adventure and action to keep kids reading, there is enough humour throughout to entertain adults.

Thanks to Netgalley and Inkshares for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

"We conversed for five minutes; now you wish for me to explain the meaning of your life? I am a bookseller."

* * *
3 / 5

I always try to switch my reading genres up, to keep me on my toes. So I decided it was time for a more fun, children's novel. I was a big fan of Flanagan's Ranger's Apprentice series and Cresswell's How To Train A Dragon books, and Sorcery for Beginners looked like it provided a mix of the teenager's-journery-to-becoming-competant-ranger/magician and fun illustrations. This book makes fantastic use of layout but it drags on a bit too long and the ending is rather unsatisfying.

"You see, Owen had learned in his thirteen years that being ordinary was far easier than being extraordinary"

This book is set up in the form of a textbook (it's more fun than it sounds, I swear!) to teach a beginner magic, and it does so by conveying the story of young Owen Macready, sorcery initiate. The book uses textboxes and footnotes to add information, to avoid the story becoming too bogged-down in details, or fun little side points. For UK students, an apt comparison might be those CGP science revision guides that are hilarious. Owen is thirteen and his mother has left him and his dad to pursue wildlife conservation abroad; hurt and angry, Owen accepts a spellbook from a weird woman in a bookstore he can never find again on the promise that it will eventually teach him a spell to re-write history. But that's only if he can do all the spells before it and keep the book away from the Euclideans, a group which opposes magic in all forms.

Owen is having marvellous fun until he uses a spell of mending for a rather unintended use: sealing the eyes of a bully shut. Unfortunately, said bully's father is a sort of mafia-mob figure who makes Owen's life difficult in all sorts of normal, tricksy mortal ways. At least, until he teams up with the Euclideans so he can get hold of the spellbook and use it to train an army of children (for only children can learn magic, you see) to take over the world... All rather heinous and it's really quite amusing. Owen is a great character, a real thirteen year old boy and not really Harry Potter like at all, and his band of friends is varied and funny.

I was actually ready to rate this book four stars, but I got to about 85% and set the book down for a week. If you can be that close to the end and not be bothered to finish (I wasn't really busy), then clearly something is lacking. Yes, the book is clever and amusing and the illustrations are fantastic, but it also left me with a lot of unfinished questions for a standalone, particularly about this magical war, and there was no real sense of urgency because you knew exactly what was going to happen.

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of this book

This review also appears on my Goodreads page

I received an advanced copy of this book through netgalley in exchange for a review. This book was kind of what I might picture a textbook from Hogwarts to look like other than it also included Owen's story as well. Overall it was an easy read but there were points in the story where I felt a bit too overloaded with characters and I had a hard time keeping track of who was doing what, when. It didn't take away from my enjoyment and appreciation of how much work went into this book. I loved that all of the spells that the characters learned were included in a step by step format complete with diagrams. I also enjoyed that many of the sections/chapters were named after movies or tv shows. My favourite special touch was the humour that was in some of the side boxes. Quotes like this : "more than a few sorcerers have awoken to find themselves floating over a city, or encased in suffocating layers of spongecake" always made me laugh. They were definitely appreciated and I always made sure to read them. This book was witty, charming, detailed, and very fun. I'm looking forward to catching up with Owen and his crew in the next book.

This is a book that tells you how to do sorcery. It is also the story of Owen MacCready, whose mother has left him, and whose father has relocated him to Las Vegas.
Owen is being chased by bullies when he comes across a special bookstore and ends up with a special book, one that will teach him magic!
However, the book may teach him magic, but it comes with conditions, the most important one being that he must not let the Euclideans get their hands on it.
Of course the Euclideans want that book more than anything, so Owen has a huge battle ahead of him, without any other problems that may occur.
Throughout the Tale, you 'learn' the same spells as Owen, so if you fulfil the sorcery requirements you should be able to cast spells like him (maybe better).
It was a good story and although it could be interpreted as a bit predictable in places, in the main it was interesting and innovative in its telling. I enjoyed the story. It will definitely suit young readers and those who have an open mind about magical stories. Try it, you may be surprised.

It was roughly 500 years ago when magic began to fade from the world. Spell books, magical artifacts and sorcerers themselves becoming nearly extinct and along with them, the nuances and secrets of spell casting.

That is, until now.

Told through the case study of 13 year old Owen Macready's experience with Sorcery for Beginners - a how to manual on spell casting and returning magic to the world. Owen is not only trusted with the manual and tasked to learn the spells housed within, but drawn into a centuries old war for control over the power of magic. Is magic real? What can we do with it? And can Owen survive school bullies, powerful ruthless millionaires and an secret society to bring it back into the world safely...

This was so super fun and endearing! I'm such a sucker for books related to magic and this filled a sweet spot for me. I loved the way the story was peppered with spells and footnotes. It really lent to an immersive and interactive adventure along with Owen and his friends. I can see this quickly becoming a cult classic and I hope this becomes a series with more volumes to follow! (I couldn't find any info on that, but fingers crossed)

Very fast and entertaining read. Characters are developed enough that it leaves the reader wanting more, but definitely has room for expanding. The style the book is written is in entertaining, however over time I ended up moving past the asides just to get through the meat of the story. Would recommend.

I got this ebook arc copy for free from netgalley and I must say this is absolutely amazing! Fall into the world of magic and after reading this book, I didn't want to put it down, even when I reached the last word.

Such an incredible book, any Harry Potter fan will fall in love all over again!