Wistril Compleat by Frank Tuttle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Similarly to [b:A Bad Spell in Yurt|1416852|A Bad Spell in Yurt (Daimbert #1)|C. Dale Brittain|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1387666766s/1416852.jpg|1407220], this is mildly amusing fantasy involving a wizard. Yurt's wizard is young and hapless, a role filled here not by the title character Wistril but by his apprentice, but in both cases, the wizards have to contend with ethical limitations on their magic to resolve a series of threats.
Wistril Compleat consists of three short stories. In each of these stories, Wistril is unable to use magic directly against a hostile military force because of his oath as a White Chair mage, and resorts instead to subterfuge. This gives them a degree of sameness, and I would have liked one of the three to have a different challenge for the sake of variety.
Wistril is bombastic and formal, and his apprentice is snarky and pragmatic, and the interplay between them works well. However, the limited range of the stories, along with the fact that I found them only mildly amusing and not at all tense, means that I won't be rushing to read more by the same author.
It also needs a good going-over by a copy editor for numerous minor errors. I counted 27, mostly incompletely revised sentences, but also some misplaced apostrophes, misspellings, typos, missing words and the like. In such a short volume, that's a high number. I'll pass them on to the author, as I usually do, and hopefully he will fix them up.
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