The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England

Book Reviews

May 4

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England Book Cover

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Secret Projects #2)
By: Brandon Sanderson

“To date, my performance was an obvious one star. Could be worse, but only as a result of gross incompetence.”

This was a bit of an odd duck of a book.

It is my first Brandon Sanderson one so I am not sure, but I get the feeling this may be a bit divergent from his typical work in terms of tone.

So here’s the sitch.

‘You’re a wizard, Harry!’

Just kidding. Wrong book.

Picture this instead: infinite other dimensions that you can purchase for yourself and can access at your will that will be versions of Medieval England.

“Your life isn’t unremarkable. You are merely living in the wrong time. Embrace your destiny— whether it be to bring Promethean light or exert relentless domination— and travel the dimensions.”

Now, as you can imagine, such an endeavor seems pricey, but fear not! There are FRUGAL ways of horizontal time travel. They are all outlined in the handy-book written by Cecil G. Bagsowrth III which is what this book is named after.

Do be aware though, that this handbook will not, in any meaningful way, help you survive whatever you may encounter. It will just scare you into all the upgrades as good marketing is meant to do.

“One star. Barf up some alphabet soup, and you might create a more useful text.”

Now picture this: You haven’t bought a dimension but you find yourself exploded into one with no memory of who you are, why you’re there, or what’s happening. And there are marauding Vikings, wights, skops, boasts, and no internet. Pretty vivid imagery, right?

That’s the premise of this book and the predicament of our main character, John West, who is a combination of 10% Adam West, 10% John Wayne, and 80% Peter Quill. (But he does have nanobots that make him nearly invincible which always helps when you’re not down the road from a hospital or even a Walgreens.)

“I’d woken up in the middle of a burning field. The review almost wrote itself. An ideal experience, if you happen to be a pyromaniac cow. One star.”

I think my favorite part of the book were John’s inner reviews of various things he was experiencing.

“Was that a clue to who I was? Some kind of… reviewer?”

[As a reviewer myself, this was truly inspiring.]

“Five stars. Hiding place sufficient, despite the lack of trees.”

“Four and a half stars. Might be better with puppets.”

“that guy could be profound. And depressing. Five stars. Should be narrating documentaries about disasters like Chernobyl. Or my love life.”

As a potential tourist to interdimensional travel, it definitely helped me make the decision to throw away my brochure and be content with living vicariously through him instead.

Thrown into this warring era, with some of his coworkers that are total monsters (can I get an amen?), John eventually ascertains the full dilemma he finds himself in:

“These poor people, crushed between forest and ocean, with a god that didn’t like them and an evil mobster from the future looking to dominate them. It was like the rock and the hard place had been joined by a bulldozer and a jackhammer.”

This book had the easiest character development a writer could wish for. He literally has no idea who he is so there’s only one direction to go.

It was a radical transformation from shockingly oblivious to powerfully self-aware and we got to watch every devastating blow as John Adam West Wayne goes from realizing the depth of his cowardice to deciding he can be the nanobot hero this dimension never asked for, is actually killed by, but also desperately needs.

“Turns out, even a coward can save the world. So long as you leave him with no other options.”

“I was moving toward something I believed in, rather than away from what I feared.”

And this moving scene:

“‘I’ve learned to fear someone else more than I do you.’
He frowned. ‘Who?’
’The man… I used to be.’”

(And yes, right after he says this with that heroic Chris Pratt-like scowl he crushes something like a boss and 80s rock music ensues.)

You may be wondering— but where are the wizards?! And are they always frugal?!

This is also the cool part of the story. Anyone who lives in the present can go back in time and be a wizard. Not with magic…

“While modern pop culture has co-opted the term to evoke the image of long beards, pointy hats, and the occasional bescarred boy with a wand, in ancient times it wasn’t so much the magic that identified these individuals. It was knowledge.”

Wizardry is really just having new and advanced knowledge that others have not obtained yet. Or crazy high-tech blasting guns like any good space movie even if it’s in Robin’s ‘Hood. (Get it?)

And turns out, frugality really doesn’t move the plot forward so we’re going to slowly back away from that term like it’s not even there.

The worst part of the book is hopefully just my personal experience and won’t affect yours at all— I read an advanced reader’s copy in digital format. Well this book includes sections from the incepted-frugal-wizard-handbook thing including pictures and footnotes and such (as far as I can tell).

But apparently we don’t have the technology to create a digital version where you can see pictures in full or whole sentences. Everything was sliced like a loaf of bread and then stacked up like Jenga.

I’m sure those parts of the book are real fun and neat and everything, but sadly, I’ll never know right now.

I’m sure the real deal book will have all the pieces.

Overall, I enjoyed this read. Interesting concept. Good, unique characters. Fun setting. I love a good redemption story and a crazy old lady in stealth-mode. The lore of the world there was hard to grasp and since I believe in one God, the mythology of the gods didn’t do much for me and felt very watered down, but hey, it’s totally fiction and from another dimension so who cares.

This is part of a series that Sanderson wrote during the Covid years, but they are all stand-alones.

Sanderson said on the Kickstarter page: “These books are an excellent place to start into my work, as they are each standalone novels that require very little previous knowledge of anything I've written before… you're going to get a sampling of the many different types of things I like to do.”

His many books take place in the ‘Cosmere’ shared fictional universe that he created (like the Marvel universe). I plan to read more from this series and just other Sanderson books in general. He seems like an author I’m going to like and I’m curious what else this Cosmere has to offer.

In the author’s note Sanderson described this book as “a whiteroom story, where a character wakes up with no memory and has to figure out who they are along with the reader.”

He mentions another “excellent example” of this in the book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which I agree is a fantastic book and as such I am happy to market here as well.