Libriomancer

Starred review from June 11, 2012
This funny and fast-paced series opener, Hines’s first hardcover for DAW, will be sure to surprise and entertain urban fantasy fans. Isaac Vainio is a Libromancer, a rare kind of magic user who can make objects from the pages of books manifest in reality. After leaving the magic field for mundane work at the Copper River Library, he’s sorely out of practice, but a sudden attack by Meyerii vampires forces him to brush up on his magical talents. The vampires are targeting members of Die Zwelf Portenaere, or the Porters, declaring war because of perceived assaults on their kind. Isaac, accompanied by dryad Lena Greenwood and pet fire-spider Smudge (familiar from Hines’s Jig the Goblin books), sets off to put a stop to the attacks and find Johannes Gutenberg, founder of the Porters, who has recently disappeared. The book is amusing and action-packed from page one; Isaac is sure to be an instant fan favorite, and the secondary characters are vivid and multidimensional.

August 1, 2012
Isaac Vainio is a librarian and a libriomancer, that is, part of an organization, the Porters, created by Gutenberg to manage the magic inherent in books. He's on punishment duty, relegated to database creation for the Porters. When he's attacked by vampires from the current crop of books and manages to defeat them with a weapon pulled from another title, he's dragged back into the machinations of the Porters organization. He's joined by his pet fire-spidera creature pulled from a book before Isaac was forbidden to work libriomancyand a fighting dryad. As he investigates what's going on, he discovers that Gutenberg himself has disappeared. There's something sinister going on with the Porters, and there are some nasty secrets about to come out into the light of day. Isaac is a likable character, and the unraveling of the mystery is a wildly entertaining story. Libriomancer is a lot of fun, and the promised sequels constitute something to look forward to.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)