The Magician’s Workshop is a book with a dynamic pace. It takes some time to comprehend what some of the book means, but you have to give it a chance. Some introductions of characters begin slow, but it picks up really fast and then you want to know more and more. It explains a lot of backstories that show why a character is treated a certain way. When you are first reading this book, you might get a little confused about what some of the words mean in the book. The more you read, it becomes less confusing. When you think that all of your questions have been answered, something happens in the book that causes more to appear. Other character introductions begin without a background, but with information about them is spread throughout the book.

The book itself is about the importance of projections, color, and the Magician’s Workshop itself.  In this book color is not explained, but it is rare and you need color in order to make it into the Workshop. The Workshop is a place where Magicians, highly trained people with color, come to make exotic projections for everyone to see. If you don’t have a color you are placed under a certain limit to what you can project. Projections are something, or anything to be more accurate, that a person can make and control. In order to have full access to project you have to have color, but not many people get color.

The main characters are kids around the age of 15 or 16 who either want, or do not want a color, or are under a lot of pressure from their ancestors to get one. The way to get a color, not guaranteed, is to go to a public ceremony that happens once a year. During this ceremony, kids go up one by one onto a podium in front of a guy holding a rod. He uses that rod to pull the color, if there is one, out of them into a collar that the kid wears. This ceremony occurs in the next book, but everything until then are events that each character goes through until ceremony starts. Some examples of these events are characters having to travel from a far distance by boat, going through a trial to see if they can actually go to the color ceremony, and controlling dangerous subconscious projections to prevent hurting people.

One main connection throughout these characters is that they all sense that something is not right with the projections that the Workshop is producing and they all want that problem to be solved. This common idea might bring all of them together. Throughout the book, some characters have mentioned something about physical contact. It seems that in their culture, touching or having physical contact with another person is looked down upon. That includes helping someone up if they have fallen, hugging, or even holding hands. I looked in the book and couldn’t find an answer to why any physical contact is a negative social interaction. That is just one of the questions that will be answered later, and that is the same for many others.

After reading this book, it will leave you with more questions left unanswered than when you first started reading the book. It becomes very interesting and more intriguing as you read and because of that I’d rate it an 8/10.