Sadly this one wasn’t for me. I wasn’t a fan of the storyline. I also felt the characters were hard to get true feelings for.

You can find hidden gems on Wattpad and fanfiction sites. For example, I loved A. V. Geiger's Follow Me Back when I read the duology several years ago, and I was hoping for the same love to be given to Santoni's I'm a Gay Wizard.

Trigger warnings: homophobia, bullying, kidnapping, assault

I don't know if a story can be 'too wattpady' but this was. The magical aspects were not executed well nor were they explained at all. The romances seemed cliche...however, I did DNF it not even 20% through so maybe they get better. Also, the main character Johnny is unbelievably awkward and just so different from everyone else. Johnny and his classmates behave similar to 12-year-olds rather than 17/18-year-olds, based on their communication and the number of times "freak" is used as an insult.

There was also just a lot to unpack with the string of homophobic slurs and assaults targeted on the main characters, and I wasn't comfortable that the main characters nor any bystanders at the busy mall the assault took place did not go to the police and charge the assailants. This situation was not realistic.

From other reviews, this is a good story for some and not for others. I just am in the latter group, unfortunately.

Sadly a DNF — time just got away from me, and this one didn’t hit me at the right mood. Still love the title, but check other reviews for guidance.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my review in any way, and the thoughts expressed are my own.
Content warning for this book: it contains a lot of scenes full of homophobia and transphobia, including slurs and violence. As a queer person, this made me uncomfortable, especially since it continued for so long with little positivity to counteract it. I would have thought that a book with the title of ‘I’m A Gay Wizard’ would be more positive about the gay and trans characters, but a huge portion of it was spent on homophobia and transphobia, it was only at the 60% mark that things started to become more positive in that regard. It was very much just characters taking hit after hit for being queer and it got tiresome quickly, especially since there were other things they could have been bullied about apart from simply being queer.
The writing style was basic and repetitive. It came across as a book with little plot or character development, and challenges arose and were handled very quickly with little problem. Pop culture references were used to do large parts of the heavy lifting, with frequent obvious references to The Matrix and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There were also numerous times of infodumping or characters randomly telling things that had little relation to the current scene.
Overall, the writing style was a 3 star but the heavy focus on homophobia/ transphobia made it lose a star for me, so I give it 2/5.

The blurb made it seem very funny and intersting, and i went into it with kind of high hopes.
But meh. It was written too boring and meh. I did not get that funny, amazing and interesting feeling.

An interesting take on a magical school, but one that is more obviously meant as control and not education. I am definitely interested in the world building, but less invested in the characters. The relationships fell a bit flat for me, and they were noticeably not as vivid as the world they live in.

The premise was interesting, but the execution was lackluster. It felt like so much was just thrown together at random. The narration also didn’t seem to consistently match the tone of a teenage boy. The excessive use of off the wall similes was very odd. It was also off-putting that the main character seemed to be white washed with being called Johnny when that’s essentially an anglicized version of his name.

Ok this was just as fun as I anticipated it to be. The title really describes what this story is and I really enjoyed it. I would definetly read more by this author.

Firstly I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. What better title to attract my attention. Really enjoyed this title and know that a lot of other people will too

I mange to get to about 11% and (once again) realised I wasn’t connecting at all to the characters. I’m definitely more of a character reader. Don’t get me wrong, I really really love my plots, but badly written characters spoil the vibe for me and is the main cause of me dnfing a book.

Plus, there was a lot of information being shoved at the reader in the tiny part that I read and that’s another reason to not carry on reading. I like having information but not that much in such a little timespan.

Let's be honest, I'm not going back to this book. I managed 18% and it was extremely triggering. I saw that another reviewer had a similar experience. This wasn't a fun read. While the premise is interesting, the whole kidnapped by the government thing was the least of the awfulness. I'm fine with dark topics, but you need to be warned about them first and there needs to be more redeeming elements than I found in this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Wattpad Books for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

I am honestly a sucker for a book that involves magic, fantastical themes, wizardry, etc.

Also, I love the cover!

I thought this book was very cute! Be warned, there are moments that are intense due to some language, homophobia and bullying. I thought the characters were precious, and I enjoyed their growth throughout the story.

Hunter and Johnny remind me a little bit of Simon and Baz from Rainbow Rowell's "Carry On." They are sweet and awkward, and overall, I thought this was a great read.

This book wasn't for me--the pacing and characterization felt a bit slow, so my interest waned before the plot started ramping up. The book has the feel of a young debut author, and I'll be finding one of their newer books to see how they're honed the talent they show here

This ended up being a DNF for me - not because it was a bad book, but because we didn't suit each other. I would happily recommend it to other readers I know, but it's not quite for me!

This was such a goofy little novel. I loved the queer representation, but the rest of this was super cheesy and maybe not well thought out? There’s going to be a little gay wizard who picks this up one day and feels SEEN and I love that for them.

This is one of those books that I keep trying to pick up and keep having to put it down. The plot is interesting, I like the characters but I feel like I'm never in the right headspace and I can't figure out why. Maybe it's the pacing? Maybe it's just that I'm still in the setup? Maybe it's my ADHD or the world feeling like it's coming to an end? In any case, I look forward to the day I can finally read this and give it a proper GoodReads review. Thank you for opportunity, I'm sorry that I just couldn't get through this book.

Firstly, I must say, it was much different from what I was expecting when I went into it: the word ‘wizard’ usually invokes a magic school like Hogwarts, but in this book, the Institution is basically a prison. There’s no cheery train, they are ‘extracted’ *ahem* kidnapped, which is often violent and involves knocking them out and them waking up in a strange place. Juan aka Johnny, and his best friend, Alison, sometimes practice witchcraft but nothing has worked; however, when they perform a spell the day after the two of them are violently attacked by their jock classmates, they unwittingly get on the radar of the Institute, whose goal is to keep magical folks separated from non-magical folks and they have a building where they keep the ones they consider ‘bad’ contained. This is basically my circuitous way of saying that instead of a magic-themed urban fantasy, the tone of the novel is more like a dystopia.

The kids who are all brought to the Institute are told that their old lives have been erased from the memory of people around them, but obviously anyone is going to try to escape. And Johnny and Alison aim to do just that – they are just waiting for more info on how to get out safely, and the only option looks like the Defectors, a group of wizards who are against the Institute, which is also like a taboo topic to discuss. So initially, they like go along with their school schedule and see how things work. Johnny finds a new friend, Hunter, who he is attracted to, and Alison finds the dreamspace for comfort, thanks to Blake, their RA, who is interested in her, but she is keeping at a distance because she fears transmisia. They are all part of the non-Lineage students, so they don’t get the privileges the Legacies do (which are basically like frats, but magical). Johnny is having nightmares of a sandman creature lurking and waiting to attack him, and he feels it is connected to the spell they had cast, but considering their recent traumatic experiences, he and Alison don’t take it seriously at first.

Now, the thing about this book is that the world-building mythos, while interesting in its outlines, is not extensive enough to fill up the world of this book. The magical school is not really magical – heck, even the spells that Johnny uses later on in the book are what he learned from Hunter or Blake, not from something in class. The whole reason for having separate classes for non-Lineage students seems flimsy, if the only reason they keep them around is for support activities. The magic is not even explained properly – it either works by intense visualization or by actually altering the workings of their universe, and they pick it up quite quickly, or can just follow instructions from a book, so what is the point of classroom learning in the first place? And don’t even get me started on those mass memory erasure spells they do when they extract students, which doesn’t fit in with the magic explanation. To look at it from a certain angle, it feels like a dystopian plotline is being enmeshed into a magical set-up, but the execution fails to do it properly.
While I like Johnny as a protagonist to read through, at times, he can be unnecessarily verbose in his descriptions, like who talks like that internally? His romance with Hunter was cute, though it got intense quite quickly, for the ending where those stakes were needed but that development wasn’t quite in place. I, however, liked the found family dynamic between them all – Johnny, Hunter, Alison and Blake, and how they come through for each other. But there was also a lot of distance we see between Johnny and Alison, when we barely get to see them as being best friends, so it lowers the stakes too.

Overall, well, I found it difficult to rate the book. I loved the mythology of the realms, and the origin of the world, etc, but the execution of magic in practice didn’t impress me. I loved the characters and their overall group dynamic, but individually I found some developments lacking. The genre mash-up is a bit disorganized, too, and while I like the themes of them fighting against the machine, I feel pushing the magical side would have made this more engaging.

This book... needed several more drafts. It info-dumped the same information, a lot, and rarely made it memorable, the descriptive language was basic, and it seemed like it was constantly in a rush to get to nowhere in particular. I.. should've known from the prologue what I was in for since that was a whole bunch of info-dump that was hard to grasp. There was also some pretty obvious plotholes (e.g, if Legacy kids are the very privileged kids of people who have magic + are in very top-tier jobs then... how are the non-legacy kids all funnelled into more menial jobs? Were do the privileged magic-users come from?)

The cover and title are both wonderful, but definitely give off a confusing vibe, since this is in no way a light-hearted or glib book. Content warnings for some pretty intense homophobia/transphobia and hate crimes probably should've been included. The time-skips was also a neat way of introducing the information. The queer representation was nice and varied, too (MC is gay, MC's bff is trans, another character is pansexual...). Sometimes it was funny. Mostly, it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

This was..... bad. The language in this was hugely harmful and I really had to force myself not to DNF immediately for the purposes of this review. Even then, this took me so long to read because I had to keep putting it down because I was so uncomfortable and disgusted. I can't think of a single redeeming point for this book.

Unfortunately, I had to DNF this title, as I could not get into the writing style and it would not be fair of me to continue reading knowing that I wouldn't like it. I think this book has a lot of potential, and if the writing is up your alley it is worth it to pick up