Long Review, heavy spoilers throughout. Read Frugal Wizard before reading this review.
The over long title should have tipped me off that this was going to be more of an anime-esque isekai than I’d bargained for. Instead, I’d focused on the words that excited me; ‘Frugal’ and ‘Medieval England’—two specialties of mine. This was my most anticipated book of the year.
And thus, I was already off to a bumpy road with this new book.
What is ‘Isekai’?
If you’re not familiar with anime community lingo, then let me explain that ‘isekai’ refers to a plot where a character drops into a world that is unfamiliar to them. Popular Western equivalents include Westworld, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Narnia.
It has been extremely popular for fulfilling escapist fantasies, but there has been also an awful lot of it and sometimes, viewers end up wondering if the plot would have been stronger without the isekai element.
I can say with confidence that Frugal Wizard does not fall into that trap. While I might have preferred a more straight fantasy story, the ‘isekai’ elements are crucial to the story. It wouldn’t be the same book without them.
The Frugal Wizard and My Own Misconceptions
In my anticipation for this book, I’d built up some ideas of what I’d expected this book to be, based on its title—and before we go any further, I want to specify that it’s 100% my fault for getting excited about an imagined book in my brain that ended up being nothing like the actual product. I closed myself off to the real book by expecting something else.
Well, or maybe it’s 99% my fault. Perhaps there’s an argument for the 1% being the fault of an iffy, overlong title that didn’t quite sell this book enough.
*
Firstly, I expected that the main character was going to be the ‘Frugal Wizard’, and I was vastly excited for a cheapskate magical person with limited resources exploring some uniquely medieval problems.
While this isn’t exactly wrong in the mythos of the book itself, as a ‘Frugal Wizard’ is simply anyone adventuring in a ‘cheap’ alternate dimension provided by the Frugal Wizard company, it just wasn’t what I anticipated.
John West, or Runian, is not even remotely frugal. He’s a thief who stole his way into this dimension and while he did arrive with limited resources, he has no qualms about using what he has, and not much of a desire to acquire more resources or settle down anywhere. Now, this does make sense within the book itself, but it didn’t scratch the specific itch that I had been expecting from this book.
I’d pinned my hopes on a story about an impoverished wizard, not a materially wealthy cyborg stomping through Medieval problems.
An Americanised Medieval England and Frugal Wizard’s Use of Humour
After putting aside my sadness that the titular ‘Frugal Wizard’ didn’t really exist in this book, not in the way I’d hoped, I focused on my next excitement: Medieval England…
…and discovered that there’s little more frustrating to me than a Medieval England written through an American lens. It took me a long time to realise that the protagonist was even American—since he didn’t seem to know himself—and the subsequent jokes comparing this period to modern Nebraska fell very flat for me. I understand that Nebraska is where Sanderson himself grew up, but I’m still not sure what to make of it in the text of Frugal Wizard.
As a reader, I was excited for the Medieval England pitch, but the protagonist’s constant complaining undermined my excitement, which was a common thread in this novel:
‘I mean, he was an off-brand Viking with more boldness than brains, but I liked the guy.’
p.63
Was it a smart idea to state within the novel that an important character reads like ‘an off-brand Viking’? I’m not sure…
Or, maybe I simply can’t take a few jokes. I’ll admit, the humour in this book did not work for me even slightly—a common complaint in the lower ratings for this book on Goodreads. While every book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy has me choking out at least a few guffaws—irrelevant of how I feel about the book overall—Frugal Wizard couldn’t even get me to crack a smile. It might be more accurate to say that this book’s humour just wasn’t for me.
A Jarring Mix of Sci-Fi and Fantasy
I personally wasn’t phased much by the merging of sci-fi elements with fantasy. I’ve read a few other books that have tried similar things and it’s an interesting experiment to try and make it work. For other Goodreads users, however, this clash is a bit much and I can understand that.
For more reads that try to bring sci-fi and fantasy together, you might be interested in…
- Summerlong, Peter S. Beagle
- The Lost Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle (Not to be confused with The Last Unicorn)
- Star Wars
- Skulduggery Pleasant, Derek Landy (Especially some of the later books)
Recommend me more books that could go in this list in the comments!
Clichés Supreme
From amnesia to dead wife, this book is painfully clichéd.
With Sanderson, when a cliché pops up, I wait to see if he turns it into something new and interesting. While that was regularly true in Mistborn and Stormlight, Frugal Wizard doesn’t turn clichés around.
It only got worse when the dead wife came back from the dead for a few pages near the finale. By this point, I had already been turned against the book, but somehow this managed to elevate my misgivings even more.
Other clichés that grated on me included the protagonist’s attempt to describe himself on page one, ‘I appeared to be male, or average heigh and muscular build’. It’s my opinion that unless there is something uncommon about the narrator’s looks, or it’s a romance and there’s an inherent interest in appearance, then there’s no need to describe their averageness… unless, of course, you’re trying to show your first person narrator as a bit egotistical? I don’t think that was the aim with Frugal Wizard‘s narrator, unfortunately.
This painful self-description was alleviated somewhat by Sefawynn’s later description of him on page twenty, ‘He’s clean-shaven as any woman, with shorn hair, feminine-hands—’. Overall, perhaps only Sefawynn’s description was needed. It told us far more about the protagonist by how he reacted to Sefawynn’s description, as well as how he is seen by others.
The protagonist also made a big deal of the fact that he was wearing jeans, not hose or some other Medieval-appropriate material, but they never came up as a plot point to identify him against the locals or anything like that—so they didn’t really matter. Perhaps it was supposed to be a plot point that was forgotten? There were a lot of moments that felt like that…
In Defence of Clichés (or Tropes)
Mild spoilers for the Stormlight Archive
Could clichés be generational or community-based? I think so. At the end of the book, Sanderson himself states his fondness for the amnesia trope:
I’ve never done one of these [amnesia plots] in novel form, and I’ve always wanted to, ever since I read The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum long, long ago.
Sanderson – Postscript to Frugal Wizard
Though, arguably, Shallan’s story in the Stormlight Archive comes quite close to a lot of the common threads in an amnesia story. But Shallan clearly isn’t the blank slate that Sanderson was looking forward to writing in Frugal Wizard.
For Sanderson, a character struggling with amnesia isn’t the cliché that I feel it is. As such, it’s possible that this could be another personal taste problem. Other readers might love this aspect to the character.
Personally, I felt that I’d seen other plots handle fantastical amnesia a lot better. Admittedly, they’re anime plots and not books. It’s entirely possible that amnesia is more difficult to convey in a novel format, and it’s true that my expectations are already a lot lower when watching anime.
Nonetheless, if you’re interested in anime, you might enjoy the following:
- Golden Time
- Angel Beats
- Dusk Maiden of Amnesia
Perhaps I should give The Bourne Identity a go?
A Rushed Book?
My overwhelming opinion of this book is that it feels rushed. It forgets its own magic at times. The protagonist quickly talks about his special augments and nanites needing him to eat more than the average person, but after a day with no sleep or food, he’s put in a pantry where he ignores the food surrounding him. I found this very confusing. I’d been told he needed calories, but he didn’t act like he needed food. What am I supposed to believe?
Next, the protagonist isn’t named until quite far in and the other characters avoid asking for his name until he figures something out, and then he chooses a new name anyway. It frustrated me that he hadn’t just decided on a new name sooner, or that his reasoning for not doing so hadn’t been explained to me. It felt awkward and avoidable.
An Age-Gap Romance?
I can’t BELIEVE I’ve stumbled into reading another one of these so soon after complaining about it with T. J. Klune’s Wolfsong. Eventually, inevitably, Runian catches feelings for Sefawynn, but how old are they?
Sefawynn is described as having a younger brother who Runian views as a youth. So the brother is presumably not yet an adult. As such, it’s more likely that Sefawynn herself is a young adult, though it’s possible that she could have a large age-gap with her brother.
Runian is described as being at least mid-thirties, judging by his career so far.
So how old is Sefawynn? I feel like there’s at least a ten-year age gap between this pair, but I’m not sure if I’m certain that Sefawynn is older than twenty-one. But if they’re both adults, then does it matter? For me, the uncertainty bothers me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be imagining, or how the other people of this world view it.
Final Thoughts on Frugal Wizard
Despite all my complaints, this wasn’t a terrible book. I was expecting fantastic, and it was just OK. There was a lot that stood out to me that I didn’t like, and very little that wowed me enough to want to talk about in a review. I might have enjoyed it a lot more as a teenager, before I’d read more widely.
TL;DR? There are better things out there that you could be reading or watching. You can check out some of my five-star ratings on Goodreads for ideas: Melancholy3004 on Goodreads.
Beyond The Spine Reviews 
3 Comments