Dear Spellbook (Now on KU/Audible)

Information

Status

Ongoing

Year

2021

Author

TK523

• Announcement: New Book Release Bar Fights and Blood Rites
  Feb 12, 2026
• Dear Spellbook: Stormcaller now on Amazon
  Jan 19, 2024
• Primal Wizardry - Book 1
  Dec 30, 2023
• Dear Spellbook Volume 1: Sorcerer
  Mar 29, 2023
• Foreword
  Feb 19, 2021

Reviews

Community Reviews(10)

• superlamapaloozaRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  Style - I personally loved the "direct-story telling" narrative style that it immediately introduces you to, although I can understand how some might not. The MC's personality, thoughts and sense of humor can be clearly derived from his journal (or spellbook) entries. I have personally always loved being able to know characters' thoughts and especially having glimpses to moments when they speak to themselves haha. It's almost as if we are the spellbook.....
  Additionally, this one has an interesting take on loops as the MC is trying to recount the events BEFORE the loop while simultaneously recording the stuff that is CURRENTLY happening in the loop and his plan to make sense of it all. It almost feels like a Nolan film where the timeline jumps around but is not too difficult to follow. I like Nolan.
  Story - I like loops too and this one is being done nicely. The world-building and magic system aspects are cool too. I got some DA: Origin vibes from it and was pleasantly surprised to see elements of it in this story (I know they're all D&D inspired, but I spent a lot more time on DA). I look forward to more of exposure to these details especially the spellform diagrams.
  Grammar - I did not notice anything that hindered my experience reading this, but I could gather from the comments that quite a few adjustments were made to the chapters prior to my reading them. But I like how the writer is quick to accept grammar suggestions where appropriate.
  Character - MC is likeable. He is analytical in his approach to figuring out his situation (not just the loop) and planning out next steps but not like some god-tier genius. Looking forward to more character development aspects. The writer also does well on expounding the supporting characters.
  It's a great read with solid world-building elements and an interesting take on loop-related narratives.
• weakman54Royal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  I agree with another review that I'm often a bit off-put by stories written in the form of journal entries, but I think this story does it very well. That, along with the interesting mechanics of the book itself makes this story very decent.
  On top of that, the prose, style, characters, etc. are all very well written, and that puts this story at "really good".
  Lastly, it's a well-written time-loop story, which for me personally puts the story at "amazing!".
  The only minor issue I can remember thinking of is that the MC seems just a tad too detached from what's going on (both the loop as a whole but also his actions within it). This is a very minor issue, and is easily ignored due to the rest of the story being great.
• Fnord13Royal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  The main character is a scholarly young Sorcerer/Wizard who has a lot of complicated problems to solve. The Dragon Blood Sorcerers recently attacked an important town, and he and his adventuring companions are likely to have a role to play in what could be a very nasty war. The most powerful organization on the continent is the Wizard's Tower, which has found a way to weaponize the bones of Sorcerers, and therefore tries to kill any Sorcerer they can find. Our Hero needs to conceal the fact that he is a Sorcerer, especially from the Paladin he is travelling with, who might kill him if he found out. He needs to find out who murdered his parents, who were investigating an ancient global catastrophe called the Flood, which destroyed most of the world centuries ago.
  But important as all these problems are, none of them immediately matter, because he finds himself trapped within a mysterious time loop, which only he seems to be aware of. It's a good thing he has a powerful, possibly sentient Spellbook to help him. It's just his luck that as long as he is trapped in the timeloop, he has to wake up every morning with the worst hangover of his life.
• Forgettable MinionRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  The story hooked me well enough with some humor in the earlier chapters. I may amend or add detail to the review as time progresses. I dislike time loops as a story concept, cardinal sin after Mother of Learning blew up I know, but I tried this story anyways and was not disappointed. Although I disliked Blessed Time, this story made me consider giving MoL another shot at some point in the future, even though initial chapters did not hook me. There's a decent amount of worldbuilding being done to distinguish the setting from a more generic medieval fantasy, which is always a plus. The eponymous (correct use of the word?) spellbook and the way our MC utilizes it keeps the story interesting as well. Even some of the functions which seem remarkably mundane to us readers really help Tal in the loops. The amount of exposition on both the magic system and the world's history are just about right, we're not left in the dark but not bombarded with info either.
  Updated 5/28/21
  Character and Story:
  The main character fits a heroic mold done well. In spite of him being the only character in focus until very recently, the author manages to make the events surrounding him interesting enough to keep me engaged. Although the MC is in a tricky situation, there is always some humor injected in to balance out the drama. Fortunately humor and musings of the main character do not obstruct the author from keeping the plot moving along, some popular RR authors can't or deliberately choose not to...
  I like how story has addressed how the loop has impacted the MC socially. The fact that people unaware of the loop feel like "NPCs" and the loneliness that ensued really made me think. MCs party members seem to fit very established archetypes, but that is not always a bad thing. Every character has a distinct voice and they don't just sound the same.
  Style:
  The diary entries and first person narration really work in this case. The worldbuilding is fascinating, and it's very clear that the histo
• HoloSolRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  The first few chapters have a forced quality that is hard for me to describe due to their purpose as a info-dump where he is writing in his journal to his semi-sentient journal. Things get smoother once the loop starts. I love loop stories, and if you do as well, there's no reason why you shouldn't read this one.
• IlafyRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  I was pleasantly surprised by this story. It does a time loop as an initial concept a bit differently than stories like Mother of Learning or the Menocht Loop in that the character (reasonably) really wants to get out of the loop, and is not hard pressed on a certain task during the loop. It brings an additional air of mystery and suspense to the story as the character figures certain things out and his perception of the loop is changed due to his own observations over time. You'll have to give it a try to see what I mean!
• JFrog55Royal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  I really like this story. It has my avorite sense of humor, interesting characters, and a plot that I'm yet to predict. I highly recommend you read it.
  Style: 4.5
  The narrative diary style choice works very well for this story. It feels a little forced early on, but the author has edits in the works and I expect most of those early flaws to be fixed soon. The sense of humor the author writes with never fails to entertain. I will give a warning that some people have struggled with differentiating past and present for some situations, but I haven't had issues with that.
  Story: 5
  I really like this story. It's a mix of slice-of-life, growth, and mystery. It doesn't rely on any major tropes and it hasn't gotten stale at all. It does start out a bit slow, so that may bother some people, but I enjoyed it.
  Grammar: 4.5
  The author's garmmar is far from perfect. I would go so far as to say that I'd have given the story a 3/5 on grammar if I hadn't read the chapters after edits had been made. That being said, the author is very open to advice and recommended changes, and they make those changes very efficiently. Post-edits, grammar lands up at around 4.5/5. It's still not perfect and there are some flow issues, but it doesn't break my immersion at all.
  Character: 5
  All of the characters are interesting. We've seen mostly the MC, but the side characters all ahve some level of unseen depth to them already, and there are mysteries surrounding them all.
  Overall, I give this story 5/5. It's a fun read and the magic system is farily intuitive. There are no glaring mistakes, and for something casual, that's great.
• SilicisRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  Fun and fantastic.  Would recommend to anyone who enjoys reading things.  It's different.  It is hard to type 50 words on my phone and I didn't know I needed to be an author to review this fun series.  50 words is a lot .  Do yourself a favor and actually read it. I hope the author gets to finish this as it is a lot of fun!
• Vitaly S AlexiusRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  This novel's lovely protagonist Tal is a sorcerer living in a world where sorcery has been outlawed and people who practice it are murdered and skinned alive, as is tradition.
  To begin with, learning sorcery for the hero was a challenge, as it required his mom to place him into extremely dangerous, wilderness survival-type situations in which his talents and skills would emerge, but also he would be blessed with hypothermia and other ailments.
  Secondly - our newly minted sorcerer must survive by pretending to be a wizard. Lucky he has a wizard's book on hand, which he mostly uses to draw caricatures of people he meets, pretending to be writing down spells.
  Stylistically, this story has an interesting angle as it reads entirely from the point of view of Tal's wizard book, into which he logs daily journal entries. The book becomes bound to his soul, so the more he writes into it, the better he remembers events. The book's magic basically blesses him with eidetic memory.
  Not mentioned in the description is the fact that Tal is trapped in a ground-hog day like situation in which he is repeating the same day. Slowly, over time the protagonist uses his book to understand the situation better and to also take advantage of it and of his perfect memory, by outsourcing event monitoring jobs - which is a creative and fun take on “the protagonist is stuck in a time loop idea” and is something that I’ve never seen in groundhog day type stories.
  Spelling is pretty good, only found a couple of minor mistakes.
  The world is full of rich detail and fun bits and feels deep as do the various characters that Tal interacts with from the comrade who is supposed to murder Tal for being a sorcerer to the kids whom Tal recruits for monitoring the loop events. Additional concepts such as - wizards who's daily, mundane job is to magically blow wind on ship sails to make boats go upriver make the world all the more believable.
  The puns [such as trying to determine a name for yesterday-today] ar
• WarLadleRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  TL;DR: The story is good. Kind of a semi-rational fic with a unique twist. Read it.
  STYLE
  The format-screw, namely the faithful commitment to journal format, is not unheard of on RR, but unlike most other attempts I've read, this story actually pulls it off consitstently. It flows smoothly from directly addressing the 'audience' into first person narration and back out again as it serves the plot or style. The journal format has some interesting advantages, such as preventing the typical analysis paralysis that tends to come with 'rational' fic. Because we're reading a diary, we don't have to sit there as the MC runs through every single option for every single situation, but we do get the cliffnotes of his decision making.
  STORY
  Furthermore, the loop scenario and world are either very well planned and set-up, or new ideas are interwoven with the old so well to be indistiguishable.
  The world building is well done, if slightly generic. I think the format really works in the story's favour here. Learning everything explicitly from the perspective, the literal writings, of the main character helps it feel much more real, more interesting that I think the same world would come across in standard LITRPG format.
  GRAMMAR
  I've found that I'm more sensitive to grammar and flow issues than the typical RR reader, and so far have not run into any significant issues.
  CHARACTER
  The characters seem very standard and flat at first, especially being that the entire story is told from the main character's very much limited experience, but as of chapter 22, we're already getting some good glimpses into more complex aspects of side character's personalities, and the MC is already showing development, so I have no worries moving forward.
  CONCLUSION
  I started reading today, after the rejig/rewrite of the early chapters was complete, and they seem to have been hugely successful. The author also seems to be learning quickly and rarely repeating any small stumbles (for example, the first co