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wealhtheow

wealhtheow

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The Theory of the Leisure Class (Modern Library Classics)
Thorstein Veblen, Alan Wolfe
Paper Mage - Leah Cutter Xiao Yen is a rarity--a female who can harness paper magic. After years of relentless training, she hires out to protect a travelling caravan. Within days, she is enlisted in the fight against an evil, immortal warlord. After defeating a dragon and the warlord, she races back to her home city to warn them of the warlord's unleashed army. Xiao Yen has a very precise personality that the author carefully constructs in the present day and in flashbacks to her training. The world is a well-developed. The tempo of the book felt very off to me, however. I'm not sure if it's a more Eastern style, or if it was just a misstep on the author's part. First, the constant interchanges between past and present cut the tension considerably: just when I was getting into the present-day story, it would switch to her past, and it's clear that Xiao Yen succeeds in her training, so the flashbacks have little suspense. Also, the ending felt both rushed and pieced together. After defeating the warlord, Xiao Yen escorts the foreign caravan to their port, has an odd interlude in which she wakes a dragon and is charged as a witch, and only *then* races back home--where I'm not sure why her warning was needed in the first place.