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ROUGH MAGIC was difficult to swallow because it tried to tell four characters’ stories in the course of about 200 pages. The story moves over several decadesand lifetimes; as a result, important, character-defining events are merely glimpses that poke in and out within one chapter, never to be mentioned again.Additionally, nearly every chapter tends to awkwardly explain in flashbacks the life-altering events that occurred since the last chapter. This skipping-stonemethod of narration ensures that we readers never feel as if there is any action going on, since everything important seems to have happened invisibly betweenthe chapters!

All of the characters are weak because they did not have the time and room within the book to develop. I had immense difficulties connectingwith and understanding the motivations of any character, so either vague or lumbering were they when they took up space on the pages. ROUGH MAGIC reads morelike an extensive character study of four very different characters rather than an actual story.

That being said, the world that ROUGH MAGIC creates for usis a rough-and-tumble, fantastical one. I enjoyed the idea of the island’s wildness being almost a character in itself. While the enormous task of developingfour characters over a period of several dozen years was ultimately unsuccessful, the storyline did bring up a number of interesting “mini-stories” that Iwould’ve perhaps liked to see in short story format—in particular, Sycorax’s development from reckless sorceress to repressed courtwoman under her husband’s hand.