YMMV / Handbook for Mortals

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Carrot Top and Wayne Newton cameos. They add nothing to the story and the meeting is never mentioned again. Yet, Zade treats it like she just ran into some A-list celebrity. To make it even more baffling, there's a brief discussion about Carrot Top's real name as though it were some obscure piece of information, as opposed to something anyone can find out with a quick Google search. Again, this conversation adds nothing to the plot.
• Epileptic Trees: There's been a lot of speculation that Sarem is the author of My Immortal, due to this book seeming to have a similar writing style.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: There are several controversies surrounding this book, which are likely the only reasons it hasn't sunk into complete obscurity.
  • It suddenly appeared at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers' List, knocking off the massively popular and acclaimed The Hate U Give, despite few people having ever heard of it; this has led to accusations that Sarem had people buy up copies en masse just to get it there. Bookstores confirmed this happened, after several authors investigated. It was taken off the list shortly thereafter and Sarem later admitted to having committed fraud, albeit with the justification that it would "match her sales outside of stores". An examination of the sale numbers she claims indicates that this is a heavy exaggeration at best.
  • The author also started up Twitter drama with Angela Thomas, the author of The Hate U Give, for seemingly no reason other than there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.
  • The cover is also plagiarized from an artist who didn't give approval. The artist in question, Gill Del Mace, was very unamused.
  • A rumor also began that Sarem was the real identity of My Immortal author Tara Gilesbie. This led to another YA author, Rose Christo, claiming to be Gilesbie and denying any involvement with this book. That erupted into its own separate controversy, which ended up casting doubt on Christo's own claim to be Gilesbie.^Explanation Christo was very tight-lipped about providing proof that she was Gilesbie, saying that she would reveal all in an upcoming memoir. But her brother, who was going to be a major figure in that memoir, publicly contradicted several claims she made about herself, which led to some other digging into Christo's life that seemed to confirm the brother's story. Eventually Christo's publisher canceled the release of the memoir.
• Protection from Editors: The book didn't appear to have much editing before being published, containing several typos, grammatical errors and poorly-structured sentences.
• Squick: The book leans a little too into the whole Mistaken for Romance thing with Zade and Charles, considering Charles is her father. This includes the big magic show sequence including Zade being kissed by a homunculus of her teenage father. Then there's the part where she goes into people's memories (because she got knocked out and wanted to know what happened) and somehow needs to spend time lovingly describing her mother Dela's attractiveness and Charles looking down Dela's shirt.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The novel's premise of a sheltered young woman who can secretly do real magic getting a job as a Las Vegas magician is potentially interesting. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't do much with this potential; it spends more time on a bland, cliched love triangle and the scenes involving magic and stage performances are mostly relegated to Zade showing off, with not much exploration of how magic works in this world, what goes on behind-the-scenes in stage magic acts or what the wider magical community thinks of Zade's career. The novel never really explains why Zade was hidden away for most of her life, either; the novel at one point introduces a sinister group of magic users who try to attack her, but it's not explained who they are or what they want despite this adding more intrigue and stakes to the story (it's implied it's being Saved for the Sequel but it could've been used to improve the first book's plot, not to mention the sequel never happened so the plotline ultimately feels pointless).
  • The romance plot also has some wasted potential; it's mentioned that it's frowned upon in the magical community for magic users to date ordinary humans (or "mortals"), which poses a potential problem for Zade's romance with her mortal boyfriend(s), but it's never explored in any depth nor causes any actual issues in her relationships.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Sofia. She's meant to come off as catty and mean, but Zade (who's never performed professionally before) basically steals her job as the lead performer and immediately gets special privileges such as not having to tell anyone about her illusion and thousands of dollars worth of makeup. Not to mention Sofia's boyfriend often ignores her, sometimes in favor of Zade (who she doesn't know is Charles's daughter)—most egregiously, when she has her fall, people pay attention to her for about five seconds, despite the fact her fall leaves her unconscious and not breathing, and literally, five minutes later people are making jokes about how she almost died. At the end of the story, Charles marries Dela after pining after her for decades, and without a single thought for his actual girlfriend.
  • At the beginning, when Mac and Zade argue over whether Zade will explain her trick (what appears to be a free fall into an illusory pool of water) to him and the crew, Mac is clearly supposed to seem unreasonable and controlling, with Zade going so far as to compare him to Joffrey Baratheon (who is notorious for being a sociopathic Royal Brat). But here's the thing: everything Mac says about why Zade should give him the details is completely correct. Leaving aside the fact that in real life Zade would have had to explain long before this point, and that any serious performer wouldn't bat an eyelash, Mac has no idea she's using actual magic. If he let a regular person run an illusion like that with zero help from the tech crew, she could break her neck, and it would be partially his fault—his conscience and his job are on the line here, but Zade is special and magical, so he's supposed to be wrong.
  • The girl working at the lemonade stand. Yes, she was being bratty, but Zade is the adult between them, and she completely overreacted to something most others would have just let go as soon as they left. But instead, Zade throws a fit, magically causes the pitcher to burst, protects everyone but the girl working the stand, letting her get drenched (and likely cut by glass). The book treats it as a You Go, Girl! moment.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Zade is an outright asshole in places. She humiliates a teenage girl (and probably gets her fired) purely because the girl is annoyed that her boyfriend is attracted to Zade, and flips a cyclist's bicycle because he bumped into her. Sofia is hardly the nicest of characters, but Zade seems to enjoy being nasty to her purely for the sake of it. Her mother is likewise hard to sympathize with; yes, she wanted her daughter to stick close to home, but she mind raped her to do it.
• The Un-Twist: In the last chapter, the writing tries to play coy about who's getting married, suggesting its Mac and Zade before revealing it's actually Zade's parents, but it's not hard to figure out what's really going on, especially if readers have seen Clueless.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Though marketed as a young adult book, all the characters are in their twenties or older, and in several places the text goes out of its way to mock teenagers. It was also published in 2017 but includes a lot of older, more obscure pop culture references that teens of the 2010s aren't too likely to be familiar with. Why Sarem chose to market the book this way is a mystery, though it possibly has something to do with the fact that it's often easier to get attention as a first-time YA author than it is in adult genres (especially with fantasy novels).

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