I have a degree in applied linguistics, and I love urban fantasy, so I thought this might be something I would like to read. After having read this, I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. It is really kind of hard to describe what it’s about, and I’ll leave that to others, but what I can say is that it is well-written. I didn’t really connect with the main character as after a while she kinda got on my nerves, enough that it drew me out of the story. Not only that, but I am also a big show me, don’t tell me, and this one was more of that: it told a whole lot. Add in the game references, the huge pages of information that wasn’t necessary, and the linguistic part not working for me, I just thought it was OK, so I guess it’s meh to me. I think others would like this; it just isn’t for me. Too bad.

More of a 3.5, but rounding up because I *want* to like this book a lot. The premise is a delight. Cool, punctuation marks are actual alien intelligences influencing humanity from our earliest days, snazzy, I'm in. Snarky, swearing, queer lead who likes to play video games and kick butt. So in! I can't talk about this book without making it sound absolutely fantastic, because the premise is so many good things stacked up into a tower of awesome. But there is something in the execution that feels ever so slightly off. I could never quite wrap my head around how the gaming spells and items translated to the real world linguistics battles. You'll like it; you'll have fun; you'll wish it had just worked a bit better.

Battle of the Linguist Mages was intriguing in it’s blurb - being a fan of linguistics and MMO games (and an expert in neither!) I was interested to see the perspective of Scotto Moore’s take.

The novel is a wicked, irreverent, complex volume. If you like simple and straightforward, go somewhere else. If you can’t read your way through information dumps, don’t read this. If you are a linguistic expert and do not believe aliens exist - perhaps also do not read this!! If you like the concepts of a fluid universe, perspective on the potential for the discovery of that fluidity, and don’t take your MMOs too seriously, you might just fall in love with this book.

There were a few aspects I would have loved to see improved. The main character, Isobel, is fun, but she is so stereotypical. Almost too much. I loved her irreverence and all her glitter, but it seem to be a challenge for the writer to write from a lesbian perspective that includes romance. It jarred a little. When each character was introduced, using race and pronouns to introduce them made it feel like the footer of an email was being added. It wasn’t natural.

That being said, the fun, humor and quirkiness are still super appealing.

I… truly do not even know where to start with this.

Battle of the Linguist Mages was not at all what I had imagined it would be. In actual fact, I do not think it is at all possible to read this book and have it be what you imagined it would be. At no point did I know what was going to happen next, and at no point was I prepared for what I was experiencing.

I loved it.

Let me try and give you a synopsis (the key word here being try): Isobel Bailie is unemployed, recently single, and the top Sparkle Dungeon (a VR game) player in the world. She gets scouted by a marketing agency with SparkleCo (Sparkle Dungeon’s company) as their client to do usability testing for the next SD game, except not really – what they’re actually wanting is Isobel’s expertise in diva-casting (an in-game spellcasting method) to help with the development of power morphemes. Power morphemes are linguistic elements (?) which, when spoken with different tonal qualities (??) and in different combinations (???) have… well, power. Like, magic power. Oh yeah, and punctuation marks are aliens (but not like, written punctuation marks, more like punctuation marks as a concept as used in speech) who have been using humanity for centuries to escape genocide. And there’s gods and heralds, too. Anyway, Isobel has to team up with a group of misfits to save the universe.

You know, normal sci-fi stuff!

Conceptually, this book is quite dense. My piddly little synopsis barely scratches the surface of the detail the book goes into, which can at times make you feel as if the cogs of your brain are truly struggling through a pool of molasses, but by god, this book is fun. It is such a wild, unhinged ride through some very cool elements (like cults, godhood, linguistics, teleportation, transmutation, the logosphere, pocket dimensions, VR gaming, dubstep…) all combined into this very strange but very brilliant novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I can understand why others found it difficult to get through. Fortunately, it was 100% up my alley, so I implore everyone to give it a go. I promise: it’s not like anything you’ve ever read before.

Many thanks to NetGalley and to Macmillan-Tor/Forge publishers for an ARC of this book.

Ready Player One meets fantasy in Scotto Moore's Battle of the Linguist Mages. So if you loved the vibes of that novel, but wanted to see it taken in a slightly different direction, then I would seriously consider checking this one out.

Isobel has become famous for her VR and gaming abilities. More specifically, she's famous for playing Sparkle Dungeon. In this game, one has to master vocal spells in order to succeed and master them she has.

Unfortunately, this fame has made Isobel a target of sorts – and not for the reasons you might expect. She's about to find herself knee-deep in a real fight to protect the planet. Who could have seen that coming?

I went into Battle of the Linguist Mages with high hopes. I fully expected (and hoped) to be blown off my feet. And while I did enjoy the read, I can't pretend that it was my favorite. Still, I don't regret reading it.

I loved the premise of Battle of the Linguist Mages but felt that it fell short in the character development department. It was a fight to care about Isobel and everything she was working so hard towards...which is a shame, because again - I wanted to like it all.

Otherwise, I did enjoy the story. I love how creative the world is and all of the events that were thrown in our direction. I wasn't expecting too many surprises, but I was wrong there! That kept the novel interesting enough for me to happily read through to the end.

I'm not going to lie; there were times where Sparkle Dungeon and its descriptions had me cracking up. The idea of it all was too vivid in my mind for me to easily let go of, and that gave me a lot of amusement. So thank you, Scotto Moore, for putting a smile on this face.

DNF'd @ 10%

Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore sounded like it was going to be right up my alley based on the short description. Unfortunately, it was not working out for me at all. It reminded me of all of the worst elements of Ready Player One in that it relies solely on telling rather than showing. I just wasn't able to hold my interest for any length of time. It does have a fantastic cover though.

I lost five hours of my life reading this book.

A quick disclaimer that this will be a very negative review. Most people on GR seemed to have a slightly better experience than me. There will also be light spoilers later, which I will mark.

With negative reviews, I like to start with something positive. Reader, I’ve pondered for days to come up with something I liked about this book. And I couldn’t think of a single goddamn thing. I suppose, if I’m being charitable, I could say I found the plot summary interesting. But really I picked this book up because a member of my blogging group chat is a linguist and I was in the mood to be a sadist. Oh how the tables turned.

For the first couple chapters, I did find myself liking our main character, Isobel. She had a strong, very distinct (if annoyingly snarky) voice and all the signs of strong characterization. This is perhaps the first time I’ve read a book where a character loses characterization over time. What started out as a strong personality quickly turned to, ‘I say whatever the author thinks will push the plot forward, but with attitude. Also I might shit in capitalism’. Her character’s not even consistent, regularly waxing about how terrible rich people, this one politician, and capitalism are but being totally chill with working for said politician until the plot demands otherwise. The side characters were hardly better, likewise seeming to exist to fill the required roles to push a plot forward. It got to a point halfway through the book where I couldn’t differentiate between villain A, villain B, etc, with no effect on my grasp of the story.

Writing-wise, this book reads like the 80s info-dumping gush of Ready Player One but it’s sparkly EDM, clubbing crossed with all the bad US-Centric leftist takes on Twitter. Moore seems to have taken personal offense to the phrase ‘show, don’t tell’. Like Ready Player One, if you removed every reference to the Sparkleland of the Sparkle Dungeon video game and the EDM club scene, you’d probably have less than half a book remaining. And while I don’t mind the occasional infodump, especially when it contributes to the worldbuilding, the infodumps here ultimately contribute no substance or relevance to the world at large. Isobel goes off on a multi-page tangent about how the GamerGate equivalent was soundly trumped by good mods, then later on how the Empress of California had all the ICE rounded up and shot and Apple/Google/FB nationalized for UBI and it means jack shit to the plot or characters.

There’s an underlying vibe of performative fake-wokeness throughout the book (see above). If Twitter leftists wrote a book, this felt like that book. Every terrible hot take, every trending political or social topic in the last two years tries to make itself known in this book through Isobel’s inner monologue. Which is why the fact that Isobel takes 40% of the book to realize she’s not working for the “good guys” all the more confounding. Moore makes an interesting choice to have Isobel introduce each side character by explicitly listing their race and pronouns like a weird extended Twitter bio, instead of just…simply using those pronouns. To me, it reads uncomfortably tokenizing. Strong ‘men writing women’ but its ‘conservatives writing leftists’ energy. I should clarify that my goal here isn’t to make any claims about the author’s political leanings, but to simply point out my discomforts and annoyances.

There’s also the following quote (mandatory disclaimer that I read an advanced copy and that the final copy is due to change):

They don’t hve full names. […] they have aliases. They didn’t have jobs, because they were busying trying to undermine capitalism.

Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore
I am, by no means, a linguist. However, I suspect linguistics as a field requires more than shouting out alien, unpronounceable ‘morphemes’ that correlate to some otherworldly occurrence (a power morpheme, if you will). Linguistics as a conduit for magic has so much potential in a fantasy novel. The development of language through various cultures has such a rich evolution over time and I was curious to see how Moore would tap into that. The ‘linguistics’ in Battle Mage, however, felt like the author really wanted to write a book about a coding-esque combat system and dressed it over with poorly-researched linguistic terminology. By halfway through, the cast isn’t even learning words/spells anymore, they quite literally just download them into their brains. For the linguists curious, no we don’t get any further than morphemes.

Light spoilers will being here

Well Katie, you’ve written so much about the failings of this book, but what about the plot? You know, that’s a fantastic question. And one that’s surprisingly difficult to answer. I’ll start easy. Isobel is the top of the leaderboard of a virtual reality (VR) video game called Sparkle Dungeon. She’s so good she gets recruited to become a beta tester for the next sparkle dungeon game, which quickly turns to a full-time position at an advertising firm where they have her said weird syllables. These syllables turn out to be power morphenes, that can manipulate how people think, which this advertising firm, the current governor of California, and a definitely-not-Scientology leader are going to use to manipulate people. (Isobel works for these people). Seems reasonable so far.

These power morphemes are actually the language of punctuation marks, who are aliens. The punctuation marks ….possessed humanity a long long time ago? Also they live in a place called the logosphere, which is a higher dimension housing all creative human thought. But the logosphere is being encroached upon by the punctuation marks’ alien enemy and threatening to destroy humanity. Someone’s trying to become god, video game characters are popping up in real life, power morpheme aria powered inter…galactic? dimensional? spaceships are apparently a thing, and having power morpheme induced heart-to-hearts with your enemies is also a thing and…. look at some point the what the fuck novelty factor wears off and you’re left with a book so riddled with plot holes it may as well be a plot cave system.

Isobel solves every problem she faces with a deus ex machine-fueled Sparkle Dungeon spell that just conveniently happens to perfectly solve the current dilemma (did I mention at some point the video game spells also work in real life?). If a Sparkle Dungeon spell doesn’t do the trick, that’s okay because Isobel’s ‘really good at improvising’, which lets the author get away with absolutely zero setup or any semblance of foreshadowing. I’ve read back on some of the live-blogging comments I made to my friends as I read and they’re practically incomprehensible.

Overall, I rate this book a 1/5. I enjoy complex books, I enjoy books where the author deliberately makes the worldbuilding complex or confusing, because eventually I’ll figure it out. Here, there was nothing to figure out, just a psychedelic-induced mess.

This book is pretty interesting but very niche. The writing style took a bit to acclimatize to. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it all yet.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Honestly, this made my head hurt. Battle of the Linguist Mages is a concept novel that I personally did not enjoy, but I'm sure some readers will really dig it.

Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced.

But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake.

Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth!

I received an advance galley of this book via NetGalley.

<i>Battle of the Linguist Mages</i> is a big concept book: a kind of science fiction spin on magic is explored through a rave-themed online role-playing game, of which Isobel is the undisputed Queen. She streams her playing time, has loads of followers, and knows the game like no one else. Therefore, she's psyched to get access to the company and test out some new game mechanics... or so she thinks. The magical spells she can readily master happen to be real, and she's not the only one who knows them. The governor of California does, in fact, and is part of a shadowy cabal intent on commanding power even as a mysterious, planet-destroying entity approaches Earth across the multiverse.

It all sounds pretty cool, and it IS cool in a lot of ways. I finished the book, so it definitely had something going for it. It was not a fast read, though, as it took me a week despite lots of reading time. I had difficulty engaging with it, and I had to ponder to figure out why.

What it comes down to, I think, is that the book is a big flashy concept but it didn't have the depth I wanted. This is a first person book, and I felt like I knew nothing about Isobel as a person. An ex gets mentioned and she's really into Sparkle Dungeon, but that's it. Then there's the pacing: huge action scenes loaded with whimsy, followed by long, drawn-out conversations to explain the whimsy. Perhaps biggest of all is that despite all of that action, I never felt like Isobel or her closest companions were in any real trouble. That's the peril of having characters who are really too powerful from the very start. There's even an unfortunate death near the end that made me wonder if these people could actually suffer, but nope. A lot of drama is lost when characters are essentially gods.

This reads like fanfiction. The writing style is off-putting and, despite my appreciation for linguistics AND video games, I found that this wasn't the book for me. The blurb was intriguing, and the premise seemed unique, but It was more akin to Ready Player One than any original concept. I'm disappointed.

Also, the use of references to our world was done poorly. I cringed when I saw the author use the word 'doggo'. It felt weird when David Guetta was mentioned too. I love pop culture references in speculative fiction (Tamsyn Muir is the BEST at incorporating early 2010s memes into sci-fi/fantasy) but Scotto Moore just didn't pull it off.

The title and cover made me request this book. Look at it, doesn’t it make you think Space Opera with magic and a pinch of language science?

The combination of magic, video games and linguistics, sounded so up my alley that I was really excited when I was approved for an ARC.

Sadly, this was not the book I had hoped it would be. It read like fan-fiction; and I don’t mean the good kind.

I could not connect with the MC. Isobel is the stereotypical gamer: recluse, full of herself, too snarky, but also too gullible.

The linguistics behind the spell casting within the game, although explained, made no sense to me. Power morphemes – so basically “shout gibberish” and you can cast a spell? Add alien punctuation marks and I am constantly thinking WTF?! Maybe I am too much of a linguist and overthinking this?

Here’s what else jarred
- The slang and pop-culture references felt out-dated, by at least a decade.
- Every character introduced themselves by stating their name, race and pronouns; “Hello, I’m …. I’m white. My pronouns are she/her.”
- A male author writing a lesbian (possibly bi) MC.
- Insta-Love

I am a huge fan of video games, fantasy novels, and a good magic system. I had heard about this book coming out and was so excited. It seemed like it would be right up my alley.

The storytelling was juvenile, the main character stereotypical to the point it was offensive, and the pacing of the novel left me wishing it were over on page 3. The author should have kept this one on the hard drive and tried again or maybe wrote from his own perception and not tried to do LGBTQIA female gamer. What came out was a weird cross between cheap cable TV fantasy and a cancelled Nickelodeon show.

Read literally anything else. This novel was absolute drivel and a waste of time.

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES by Scotto Moore read like a mashup of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Lexicon, Space Opera, and Ready Player One. This is a romp of a space opera.

We get Isobel, a first-person narrator, who’s dominated the video game Sparkle Dungeon for years, recruited to help fight an alien invasion. How do they fight off the coming invaders? Linguistics with the help from….wait for it….punctuation marks. No really. Punctuation marks which arrived on Earth thousands of years ago, fleeing the coming destruction and finding malleable brains in us.

Now the punctuation marks have been teaching a few people how to use morphemes - small units of words that can be combined and then spoken or sung in a way to do everything from teleportation to causing a feeling of ecstasy.

If you’re a fan of incredibly complicated plots and magic systems, this is for you. Also, if you’re intrigued by or want to learn about linguistics, also for you.

If you’re looking for something straightforward and simplistic, definitely not for you. If you loathe info dumps, also definitely not for you.

I enjoyed the wicked and spot-on looks at marketing and gaming and the very pointed takes on religion and government, including thoughts about anarchy.

There’s:
Queer and nonbinary rep
Queer romance
First-person POV
Women nerds
Chosen one trope
Video game as training to battle aliens trope
Alien invaders - which ones are good and which are bad
Mysterious death/disappearance of a company leader
All of the gaming, music, religion, and philosophy references that you could want
All of the witty bants

I enjoyed this intricate puzzle of book with its complex magic system, complicated plot complete with constantly shifting alliances, double and triple alliances. And all of that glitter!

I was provided a free copy of this book through Netgalley, which in no way influenced this review.

I’m really struggling to put my thoughts together for this book. The premise and synopsis for this book sounded so cool and interesting, but I feel like the author didn’t provide what was promised.

Let me start of by saying that for the entirety of this book, I felt dumb while reading. Everything was explained in such an academic way, that it was really hard to get into the story and get the flow going.

The characters felt very two-dimensional and we didn’t really get to see bonds being formed or character building.

The romance was cute, but a bit forced. I loved that we had a lot of representation in the book, which you don’t see a lot of in this genre

The description of this book caught my attention immediately, and a cover blurb from one of my favorite authors? Sign me up!

The book isn't quite what is promised, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that it has so much potential. It's like how Ready Player One reads a lot different in a post Gamer Gate environment.

(Also, to be fair, the description I first read when looking through review copies is different than what is up now.)

Now, don't get me wrong, the premise is phenomenal. I love a good SF that takes seeds of the here and now and goes "what if?" It looks at where VR gaming is now, where streaming and MMOs are now, the balance between real life skills and game controls, and launches into a believable continuation. Then we get a little seasoning of magic and more. It made me laugh and has some neat ideas that it develops.

But writing and tone wise, it feels a lot like Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Armanda (also) by Ernest Cline, or The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak. It doesn't have the obsession with the 80s, but it has the same all-encompassing nerd focus without a lot of actual character depth. The info dumps will either let the reader skim and get the basics of what they need to know or bog the reader down, it'll depend on your reading style, but otherwise the reading is easy and very much on the surface. It might also appeal to fans of K. Eason's books (How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse) in terms of writing style and pacing. I would say comparisons to Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir or Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson are well intentioned but ultimately misleading in terms of narrative voice, story complexity, and overall feel. Rather than a hard, complex SF, we get a glittery light romp. That's perfectly fine, and something I often enjoy, just not exactly what's advertised.

There is a sense of humor and a consistent tongue-in-cheek element that carries through, much of which I found honestly delightful. Acknowledging that the sounds an advanced player sound rather like they are being mauled a mountain lion, section titles like "Sparklepocalypse." There's wit and humor here that will resonate with anyone who spends time in gaming communities.

It has diversity in its characters, but it feels more like metadata tags rather than developed characters. However, I do not think that the issue is because the author is trying to force diversity without really understanding how to write queer folks. The lead is something of a gamer girl stereotype with a few distinguishing quirks, just like Wade, the cis-het protagonist of Ready Player One, is a gamer boy stereotype with a few distinguishing quirks. I wouldn't say the representation is bad, just that it's going to leave some people wanting more.

Overall I'd say the book was a 3/5 for me.

Advance Reader Copy courtesy of Macmillan-Tor/Forge in exchange for an honest review; changes may exist between galley and the final edition.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this eArc in exchange for an honest review!

Firstly, when I heard about linguistics and video games being combined in one book, I was overjoyed. As a linguistic major who uses games to teach language, this is exactly what I wanted to read. However, I have mixed feelings about this book.

Let's start with the positives. The immediate atmosphere as I started to read was cheerful and bright, much like the excitement of playing a new game for the first time. I was intrigued by the intricate worldbuilding carved into the game. Moore created an entire world for the game, right down to landscaping and hierarchy. For fans of Ready Player One and Tron, this might be the kind of setting that you like. Moore did a brilliant job of bringing the game to life, and despite it being a VR game, you feel like it's taking place in real life. The visceral descriptions of the game were the star of this entire book. The imagery in the last part was fantastic, something that you would surely see in a movie. Moore went big with this book, intergalactic even (heh, see what I did there?)

Also, the lead character is sapphic, though I'm not sure how I feel about that with the knowledge that the author is a man.

Now, we move on to the rest. The writing style of this book is very heavy, with a ton of info-dumping that made it very hard to sustain interest. I fought the urge to skip the entire middle and read the ending. There was so much tell and not enough show. I had gotten through 100 pages, and I still wasn't riveted. I was still finding it very hard to keep track of the characters and their avatars, and what the objective of Sparkle Dungeon was in the first place. I also wasn't a fan of the name Sparkle Dungeon, but that's just a personal preference.

Also, the fighting style that we're introduced with threw me off. Isobel fights using power morphemes which work best when they're verbal. These morphemes aren't real words - just a combination of sounds. The more powerful the combination, the stronger your attack is, and you have to experiment to find the right morpheme combination. Which means that Isobel is... yelling gibberish? I didn't like the image of that, especially knowing that it's a VR game, and there are actual people around her. And when the punctuation marks came in, this was the final boss for my imagination. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how it worked in the game despite it being explained.

Though not the biggest part of the book, the part that bothered me the most was the way pronouns were written. The pronouns of each characters are introduced quite literally, like Isobel who introduced herself to the readers as "she/her and white". While I appreciate Moore's attempt at being inclusive and normalising the pronouns you want, the style of writing felt very tokenising. I would have preferred just straight-up usage of the pronoun instead of each character saying "hey, I use a/b pronouns'.

While this novel is an admirable attempt, I do think there is a lot of room for improvement.

2/5 stars!

Thank you to Tor Dot Com Publishing for an ARC on exchange for an honest review!

Sci-fi is one of my favorite genres, and the title alone made me want to read this, but the more I read, the more confusing the book got .

I like the premise and the idea of the book, but 1: the main character, Isobel, is queer, and from what I can see, the author is not. He didn't do a bad job writing a queer woman MC, but he also didn't do a great job? She was sassy constantly, which is fine, and I do love that she's queen of the game, basically, but it also felt like gamer woman stereotypes.

The book was also SUPER difficult to follow. Like, Harrow the Month was difficult to follow but this was something else entirely. The magic of this world didn't make a lot of sense, and we don't get a lot of explanations, so there's a point at which I kind of have up trying to understand the world.

And hello insta-love. No thanks.

Overall, cool idea and premise and world, but poorly executed.

Okay like, linguistics, video games, trans characters, fighting against cults and capitalists? This book was created to appeal to me so well that it borders on frightening. I had such a blast with this one. Every single chapter was its own wild ride and I was so quickly absorbed into this story that I actually ended up reading the entire arc twice over. It's so fun and campy, I had an absolutely fantastic time with it. I'm so excited to read more of Scotto Moore's future books!