Magus of the Library Vol IV By Mitsu Izumi

Magus of the Library Vol IV

By Mitsu Izumi

At this point, I feel like I should just point you back to the last three reviews on the series if you need to know the concept and background of the story. So if this is your first review, go ahead and take a look and catch up. For those of you who have kept up, good news! Theo Fumis, our hero, has passed the examinations and made it into Kafna training! Bad news, compared to the training, the examinations were a walk in the park (Uh Oh!). This volume brings us to the beginning of Theo's training and we can see the Kafna are not messing around. I mean, seriously they open the first day of class with a test just right off the bat. That's bloody cold, no chill in the central library (None at all.  Not even a hello…).

What's interesting is the variety of trainees though; we have trainees of different religions and nations and cultures all thrown together. There's also a wide range of ages present, with the eldest being 35 and the youngest being 11. That said the overwhelming majority of the trainees are girls, for reasons we learned in the last couple of volumes. Theo isn't the only young man here however, Alv has made it and there's also a new character Sumomo. Sumomo is a nice enough boy.  However, being the youngest of a family of nine sisters, two of which became Kafna, definitely left a mark on the poor boy as he regards girls as dangerous (Woah.). This is more of the youngest child being a bit scared of his elders kind of thing than what you would find on Reddit though so I'll let it pass (Yeah, I’ll let it pass as a survival strategy rather than incel energy.).

We learn more about the supernatural disaster that shaped Theo's world in this volume.  For example, we learn that everyone is cut off from the sea, because large parts of the continent are still covered by a dangerous blighted fog that corrupts or kills whatever it touches (That… is gonna mess up global ecosystems really well. See, soil nutrients get washed out of the soil and into watersheds, where they get transported to the sea.  Barring rock weathering, the only way to get things like phosphorus back onto land is by transport via living things.  This is why dams kill forests upstream, fish like salmon can’t bring those nutrients back upstream). To the point that most believe that life itself is impossible within the fog. However, we learn that's not entirely true and something's lurking in the fog even if no one is entirely sure what it is.

We also learn that there's at least one monotheist religion that starts the day off with a round of morning prayers; they also represent their god as having the head of a Triceratops (There are worse things to use as a godhead.). Another thing we learn is that students at the end of their training get assigned to one of sixteen offices and three of those offices are considered more prestigious than the others. Those being the Treasury, Guidance, and General Affairs offices. Not in small part because the leadership of the library tends to come from those offices.

While most of the trainees are burning with ambition, Theo is just struggling to deal with the new weight of training. It doesn't help that being a Kafna was the height of his ambition, so now being asked to look further ahead he finds... He has no idea, he just wanted to work among the books and help give back to the Library what the library had given him. I honestly just find myself wanting to give Theo a comforting pat on the head and tell him it'll be alright as long as he tries his hardest but this is a serious job he's embarking on (Honestly that might be all he needs.).

We learn in this volume that the central library is engaged in a bitter battle against those who wish to use the infrastructure of the libraries to push certain ideologies and views on people while hiding other ones. The Kafna have to run a strict regime of constant inspections to prevent books from disappearing or forbidden organization methods being used to promote one set of ideas over the others (I like this militant eccumenicism.). To put it bluntly, the central library is waging war against leaders and factions who wish to control the flow of information and they can only win by constant vigilance. Meanwhile, we also get the hint of internal politics being played out in the library.

This is because one generation is passing away and with it the last remains of the living memory of the dangers of disunity and how division almost destroyed everyone. The new generation meanwhile is living in a society where xenophobia hasn't been banished yet and there is the temptation to pursue self-interest over the good of everyone. Theo's world approaches a dangerous transition point where if one generation refuses to learn the lessons of their elders they could end up losing everything that has been gained.

Theo, lost in his own problems, is largely blind to this and to be fair he is a rural village youth barely old enough to shave. So it wouldn't be fair to expect him to be steeped in geopolitics. As he flounders in his own self-doubt and struggle, we do have the reappearance of someone capable of inspiring Theo to new heights. A woman who can not only do that but will revel in it and make it as super dramatic for Theo as possible.  Because if she can't do it in a way that is cool and fun, what's the point? I'm course talking about Sedona Bleu, who has grown into a powerful member of the Protections Office. I have to admit I enjoy Sedona taking extra effort just to add a flair of the dramatic to her interactions with Theo.   Even if it is just slightly ridiculous.

I enjoyed Volume IV and in a way, it seems to be setting the table for a new story featuring Theo. Whereas the last three volumes could all be read as the story of how Theo came to his ambition to be a Kafna of the library and how he realized that ambition. Volume IV is showing us how Theo is very much like the dog that finally caught the car he was chasing. It's also building up to the wider story we're seemingly about to embark on. As always the art was great and the storytelling is well done.  I imagine some folks might not like the pace but I'm enjoying having a writer who isn't in a hurry and wants to spend some time on characterization before throwing us into the fantasy epic. Volume IV of Magus of the Library gets an A from me.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s review.  If you did and would like to have a voice in future reviews and a sneak peek at our special summer project, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote on upcoming reviews and projects for as little as a dollar a month!  I’ll be updating our reward tiers this month so stay tuned for future updates. In fact, my patrons have a poll up regarding the summer project right now!  Next week however I return an ever-wise patron favorite in The Heroic Legend of Arslan Volume 3!  Hope to see you there until then, stay safe and Keep Reading. 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders