Magicians of Mazda review

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The Magicians of MazdaThe Magicians of Mazda by Ashwin Sanghi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Review of Magicians of Mazda:

An information overload of a history class at every page, forcibly molded into a story far away from characterization and impressive but ineffective plotting.

Before reading Magicians of Mazda, I was excited about the journey. With exploring more and more of this book, a sense of great writing impressed me. However, as the number of pages proceeded there was chaos disrupting the storyline. Whenever a novel is read, the core theme surrounds the characters. It is only for the characters that the plot is impacted; in Mazda, the characters are forcibly placed to accommodate the plot.

There was an average feeling post-completion of this books – the good parts being some knowledge coming in an understandable way. But when a desperate attempt to collide mythology and fiction without smooth transitioning is made, the only thing the reader is left with is information overload. Why cannot storytelling and history lessons be kept separate? If this invention has impressed a mass of readers, then I totally respect the choice but I have seen when the execution is strongly made. Chethan Bhagat’s “3 Mistakes of my Life” made a stupendous feeling of relatability because the protagonist was hit by events around a certain timeline – when the riots and earthquake happened. In MoM, the timeline is utterly confusing and I felt there is lots of chaos regarding which timeline is going when.
I love the fact that the author is doing incredible research in the field. He is one of a kind who has taken the readers into a frenzy of imagination. In Mazda, I will never complain about the complexity. Instead, the complex things are made simple, I love that about the book. But definitely, after having read Dan (oh yeah, the writer Dan Brown and not Dan Cohen in this book) I didn’t find the kind of connectivity with Magicians of Mazda. And how can that even be possible in a set of fast-pacing sequences?

Maybe my expectations were wrong from this book but a sense of involvement with the characters and the storyline could have gone deeper. How much is on Jim’s plate apart from his ancestral legacy and history? Emotions are vaguely given any significance and have canceled out everything good. As a reader, I should feel the haunting of a failed mission and celebrate the victory of the protagonists which unfortunately was missing here.

You have to make more robust characterizations if the whole plot is to keep it all under wraps and raise the curtain on the very last page.

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