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This was a good read, I picked it from the list of Kindle Unlimited books and I'm not disappointed! 
 
It's set in an alternate Victorian age, where there are magicians who can work magic with any manmade material - metal, glass, plastic... and paper, hence the title. Magicians bond with their chosen element and once bonded, they can't change their mind.
 
Ceony has always wanted to become a Smelter, a metal magician, but at the last minute she is informed that due to the dearth of magicians going into Folding she must bond with paper, which she sees as weak and useless. She is incredibly disappointed but her choice is paper or nothing, and so she becomes the apprentice to Emery Thane, the preeminent Folder in England.
 
Initially she believes that folding is good for nothing but entertaining children, but Magician Thane soon shows her there is much more to being a paper magician, and her skills are quickly put to the test when she encounters an Excisioner - a magician who uses human flesh and blood.
 
It's a bit of a mixed bag - the prose is a little juvenile but it's engaging, lots of description of what Ceony is seeing and experiencing, everything is so new to her and by extension the reader. It's a bit like a souped up Harry Potter - she's learning magic, but there's a horror element provided by the gore associated with practicing Excision. 
 
It's not a particularly long book, and it's part of a series, so most of my questions are not answered. We don't know the full history of some of the main characters, and I expect that to unfold in the next book, which is ready and waiting on my Kindle!

This is an interesting little collection of tales that come together nicely in an overarching story.
 
The premise is that we're in a post-apocalyptic future where the atmosphere is highly toxic and corrosive and the last pocket of humanity is surviving in the silo, an underground tower designed to be self-sufficient for as long as it takes for the world above to become habitable again. It's been a few hundred years so far.
 
The only contact with the outside world is via viewscreens fed from sensors on the surface which gradually become coated with a layer of grime, obscuring the image. The punishment for most transgressions in the silo is to be sent out to clean the sensors, which is a death sentence - there's no way back inside before your protective suit is damaged by the corrosive wind.
 
The first few stories are short, the events told from a different character's viewpoint, and introducing us to other people who tell their own stories later on. The final installment is much longer than the others and jumps between characters to give us the full picture about what's happening.
 
The very first story was a great introduction and really set the scene for what was to come. The situation is explained, and we're given a whiff of the corruption inside the silo that isn't evident to most of the inhabitants. I thought I'd seen the twist in the tale a mile off, and I kind of had... but there was more to it. A brilliant start to the