Review: Urban Fantasy Novella ‘Sorcerers’ Will Leave You SpellBound

Let’s start off with this, any book that has a character who’s referred to as the Gandalf of Harlem wins. In fact, if I ever became superstar, and I was performing at a club in Miama, it would be in the rider of my contract,  that I would have to be introduced as The Gandalf of Harlem, despite the fact that I’m from Maryland and I learn more towards Dark Elf Battle Mage than Middle Earth Merlin wizard. Maurice Broaddus and the NeoText Writers room put together a gem of a novella in Sorcerers. One hundred pages, no fat on the bone, this was a neat, tight, get in/get out type of tale. I used to be very suspicious of novellas, I didn’t think you could get a complete story in that small amount of space. I worried that authors would be writing in a straitjacket, confined by the slashed page-count with very little room for character development, but Broaddus & company really stomp a Steve Austin mudhole that supposition.

AMC is Adapting Maurice Broaddus’s Illustrated Novella Sorcerers for TV

Sorcerers takes place in New York City, and it’s the first Urban Fantasy I’ve read that really focuses on hip-hop as a way to move the plot and the characters forward. Jemisin does this a bit in The City We Became, but while hip-hop is a rider in that story, it’s the driver here. Our main character Malik is a ghostwriter and drops bars for up and coming & established rappers. Malik’s Wolf of Wall Street choices land him in hot water and he turns to his grandfather, beloved city a…