talkmagic.co.uk

My first review, please be gentle!

The Effect
464 pages of beginner's guide to sleights, some basic card tricks, with a section on non-card magic tricks, stuff like coin and rope magic.

Cost
€6.99 at play.com

Difficulty
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)
About 1-2, occaisionally 3

Review
The card section of this book (which is the section I actually bought the book for) turned out to be rather disappointing. The sleights section is quite good, but when he starts describing some tricks, the book goes downhill. The tricks are rather difficult to follow, and while there are some illustrations, they are often unclear and do nothing to help the reader understand the trick.

One thing that irritated me was the self-important tone that Longe uses. He starts off every trick by saying, "I invented this trick when..." or "XYZ invented this trick but I made it better". I'm all for self-appreciation, but this guy takes a tad too far a tad too often.

The rest of the book, dealing mostly with coin and other magic, is OK. Some of the tricks are quite good, but in my opinion they lack the WOW factor that could give your performance an edge. Many of the dice tricks are based on the fact that the two sides of a dice add up to 21, and although Longe says that most people don't know this, I asked a couple of my friends and they all knew that, which would render a lot of the tricks useless.

However, being a maths freak, I enjoyed the number tricks section near the end.

Overall
MAYBE worth a buy for a beginner with a low budget, but Royal Road and Mark Wilson's etc, are better choices for not that much more money.

4/10