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By Ed Sum
(The Vintage Tempest)
- Spoiler Alert
As a casual Magic the Gathering player who has been paying attention to the backstory on the cards, the novel War of the Spark: Ravnica intrigued me. The author, Greg Weisman is best known for his work in producing Disney’s Gargoyles and Young Justice. His vision gave us characters to love. With his original work Rain of Ghosts, the world around the Florida keys is wonderfully flavourful and his narrative approach makes the two books easy reads.
In Ravnica, the struggle is real. While I could not put down the Rain series, I had to start pausing and spend each day reading a few chapters. He is working in a universe not of his design. Wizards of the Coast hired him in their bid to return to publishing fiction and he should have insisted on focussing on a handful of characters he is genuinely interested in instead of the other way around.
The story jumps from multiple points of view and I prefer the one with Teyo the Shieldmage first and Liliana the Necromancer over all the others. With more than a dozen planeswalkers descending upon Ravnica to take down Nicol Bolas, the huge amount of characters involved are simply overwhelming. Thankfully, each chapter has a name of the person it’s focussing in on so I can jump to the parts I want to read.
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