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

Honestly, this book was forgettable. While reading it, I enjoyed the experience, but I can't even remember the characters or the majority of the plot points in the book.

It was alright. I disliked the fact that it turned into a romantic plot towards the end and just ended so abruptly. The action scenes were well don't tho. Really enjoyed those. 
I believe it had an interesting plot but the execution was poor. Very poor. Except the action bits and the gayness of it, I don't think I enjoyed much.

I’m a Gay Wizard introduces Johnny and Ali, two teens on a journey of self-discovery. Their journey, however, gets much more complicated when they decide to dabble in magic, cast a spell with serious consequences, and get kidnapped by a mysterious group of people who take them to a secluded magic school. But even the magic school isn’t all it seems. Secrets hide around every corner and trying to uncover them may cost them their lives or the lives or their new friends.

I have mixed feelings about this book. First, the positive. The representation and diversity of characters was a welcome change. Johnny is openly gay; Ali is a transgender; Blake seems to be pansexual, though he never states this; and Hunter struggles with his sexuality due to the way he was raised. All of these characters and perspectives are woven in seamlessly and the sadly realistic backlash to several of the claimed identities can also be viewed by the reactions, both verbal and physical, that the side characters exhibit.

There were some aspects of this novel that I found challenging. The writing at times felt unpolished. For a debut novel, particularly one that originated on Wattpad, that is forgivable, particularly if the characters, world, and plot are able to drive the story. As mentioned above, the characters worked; however, the world and plot felt flimsy. The plot, while relatively straight forward, suffered from the fact that the world needed to be developed more. There were several groups and plot threads that could have been teased out to allow more connections to an awesome group of characters and this would have created suspense for the eventual story finale. On that note, there were other aspects that seemed extraneous and probably could have been cut to allow more space for this development.

Don’t get me wrong. I really wanted to like this novel and I think there was great potential here. But I probably should have known that it would be a bit of a struggle when I started the book, read the first five chapters, and had to put it down for nearly six months. Though there is a planned sequel, I’m a Gay Wizard had a definite ending, and a happy one at that, and I’ll most likely just leave it there since I probably won’t be picking up the next book in the series.

A wonderful story if a bit muddled. I found the characters to be rich and jump off the page full of life. The story itself lacked a bit for me. I found I could only read it a few pages at a time before having to put it down because I would lose interest.

Overall I would recommend despite the issues I had.

This book was great in terms of LGBTQ+ representation, but when it comes down to pacing, world building and honestly the writing, it just wasnt great. This book is supposed to be about wizards but not much magic actually happens. There is also a lot of triggering things within this book with no trigger warning, maybe something to work on.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. A full review will be posted on Amazon and Goodreads

DNF
The few % I read so far already had major content warnings for bullying, transphobia, homophobia, extremely violent hatecrime against teenagers and kidnapping, all of which I didn't expect it such a graphic and detailed manner.

Sadly, the ARC version I got via NetGalley has ATROCIOUS formatting (I'm reading on Kindle.) It's almost unreadable with random or missing line breaks/paragraphs, page numbers in the middle of a sentence, missing chapter formatting and so on.

The premise of this sounds great, and it's #ownvoices rep for the latinx and gay protagonist! His best friend is trans and awesome, too! However, the writing was awkward, the conversations unnatural, and what happened felt over the top and disturbing. I do not think I would enjoy this title if I kept reading.

Shout out to NetGalley for providing me an eARC in return for an unbiased review.

I rarely DNF a book, but this one is one of the few. I gave it a solid shot, and had originally picked it up because it was one of the few books I’ve seen personally that were originally from WattPad. It’s not a site I often go on but I had heard of it from many people so I figured why not. Unfortunately YA hasn’t and still doesn’t speak to me. The writing style doesn’t inspire a lot in me and this book did very little to change that. I got about 40% through the book before I realized I was just grinding and wasn’t enjoying anything. The blurb is great, the cover is great, they’ll definitely catch readers, I just wonder if it will have an easy time holding said readers.

Originally, I don’t believe this book was branded YA when I first asked for it, now that I am sure it is, it doesn’t live up to the potential it described originally. 2/5 from me.

This one didn't work for me and I didn't end up finishing it for now, but there's a lot of potential here! The characters and concept are promising and I can definitely see other readers enjoying this.

I felt very conflicted when reading this book. I kept having to put it down and come back to it but I didn't want to completely give up on it.

I appreciated the characters and their development however the writing style just wasn't for me. The book and idea itself was interesting however I do not think it was executed as well as it could have been.

The blurb and cover definitely grabbed my attention, it was unfortunate that the story itself could not.

This concept had a lot of potential, but it sadly didn't live up to it. The writing was odd and although it is not branded as a YA book, it definitely feels like one at times.