fidzu : debian

Review: The Cloak and Its Wizard, by R.Z. Nicolet

Publisher:	UpLit Press
Copyright:	February 2026
ISBN:	1-917849-15-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	423

The Cloak and Its Wizard is a standalone (at least so far) urban fantasy superhero (sort of) novel. R.Z. Nicolet is the marketing pseudonym for Rachel Reddick. This is her first novel.

I'm picky about wizards.

The wizards themselves will complain about that, but of course I'm picky. When I choose a wizard, barring utter abandonment of moral scruples, it's a till-death-do-us-part situation. (Their death, not mine. I'm the next best thing to indestructible.)

The Cloak of Sunset and Starlight is a major artifact, meaning that it has its own preferences and is capable of independent action. It has been sitting in a glass case in the wizards' library for about a hundred years, waiting for someone interesting. (Well, mostly sitting. Occasionally it sneaks out to eavesdrop or move the books around.)

Veronica Noble is interesting. She's older than most initiates, thoughtful, observant, and clearly had some mundane career before joining the Order. Her aura is appealing, and her mental shields and resistance to influence are intriguing. Normally, the Cloak would take its time investigating a new potential wizard, but the Sword was making thoughtful rattling sounds, and no way is the Cloak going to let the Sword claim her first. Time to choose a new wizard!

It was nice, being draped over warm shoulders, and feeling a heartbeat again.

I could tell she closed her eyes without even looking.

She sighed. "I just got picked by the intransigent one, didn't I?"

The last time I picked a book from the Big Idea feature in Scalzi's Whatever blog, it didn't go that well, but if you're going to write a book specifically for me, I'm going to read it. There are very few tropes of SFF that I love more than intelligent companion objects, and Nicolet's introduction to the story was compelling. So I gave this book discovery method another chance.

I'm glad I did, because this was exactly what I was in the mood for and a delight from cover to cover.

Veronica Noble is not a typical wizard. She's a surgeon and was quite happy to be a surgeon until an unexpected encounter with a magical creature killed her brother. The forgetting spell that the wizards who came to handle the Cassandra wyrm didn't work on her, so she was dragged reluctantly into the secret magical world of the Order. This long-lived society of wizards quietly defends the world against magical intrusions from other planes of existence. Now she's a wizard with a magical cloak, which she is not at all sure she wants.

Veronica is not the protagonist, though. The Cloak of Sunset and Starlight is. As far as it is concerned, its job is to assist its wizard, enjoy watching interesting feats of magic, and look fabulous doing so. It's protective, dramatic, rather vain, endlessly curious, easily bored, and intensely loyal. When it becomes clear that the Order has some serious problems, the Cloak knows what side it's on.

This sounds a bit like urban fantasy, so I was surprised when the first superheroes showed up, although given the explicit Doctor Strange inspiration I probably should have expected them. The Order and the superheroes do not mix, at least at the start of the novel. The wizards view the superheroes as a loud and irritating intrusion and hide magical activities from them the same as they do the rest of the world. Veronica's opening opinion on superheroes is based on being a trauma surgeon in a hospital dealing with the aftermath of their fights (which makes me wonder if the author has read Hench, although the idea is older than that book). As with the Order, the role of superheroes in this world gets more complicated as the plot develops.

There is a surprising amount of plot and some very nice world-building here, including multiple twists that I was not expecting. Veronica is the sort of stubborn and deeply ethical person who will not leave a problem alone if she has the ability to fix it, which is a good recipe for getting deeper and deeper into a complex plot. She's believable as a surgeon: somewhat taciturn, calm in emergencies, detail-oriented, methodical, and not at all dramatic. This makes the Cloak a perfect foil and complement. Watching their partnership develop was very satisfying.

This is a sidekick novel, and like the best sidekick novels it makes the not-protagonist more interesting and more relatable by showing them from an outside and skewed perspective. Piecing together what Veronica must be thinking is part of the fun, as is sharing the Cloak's protectiveness towards her as it becomes clear how much she's been through and how good of a person she is. The Cloak's personality was a little too much like a cat for me - I would have preferred a more unique viewpoint, fewer cat-coded shenanigans, and a bit less of the running laundry machine joke. But that's a quibble. Its endless curiosity drives the plot forward and uncovers more of the world-building, and I just love reading stories from the perspective of this sort of loyal and protective magical creature.

I had so much fun with this book. It's a popcorn sort of book, and I thought the ending sputtered a little, but overall it was great. Parts of it could have been designed in a lab to appeal to me specifically, so I'm not sure if other people will enjoy it as much, but its hit rate with my friends so far has been good.

Highly recommended, and I will be watching for any further novels from Nicolet.

The Cloak and Its Wizard reaches a satisfying conclusion and doesn't advertise itself as part of a series, but there is room for a sequel. If Nicolet ever writes one, I'd read it.

Rating: 8 out of 10

30 Mar 2026 2:46am GMT

MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026 was held on 14th and 15th March 2026 at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Having a Debian conference in the North was something many folks wanted. Ravi started the discussion (with local IIT Kanpur folks) almost 7 months before the conference. Lots of folks from Debian India joined in organizing the conference, which was nice. All the meeting notes and discussions were posted on the Debian India mailing list, a first.

Despite all the efforts, the conference start was delayed due to logistical issues. Things went fine post Day 1 lunch. We had two days of almost full schedule. disaster's The Means of Communication was an interesting talk, diving into decentralized communication.

IIT Kanpur is a huge campus with nice footpaths and greenery. We got the opportunity to explore their HPC at Computer Center post conference.

Work has been started for MiniDebCamp Kochi. More details can be found on the wiki.

Working to make this conference happen was different with all the challenges involved, but overall, everyone was happy with the outcome.

30 Mar 2026 2:24am GMT

Laptop

For a while I've been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in Debian/Trixie running KDE for reading ebooks on my laptop, it generally works well and has a large font size. The only downsides of it for that use are taking more RAM than I would prefer (about 780M RSS which seems a lot for a relatively simple task) and having separate windows for the list of books and reading an actual book without any options to just open the last book and not delay me.

I tried Arianna 25.04.0-1 in Debian/Trixie, it has a significantly smaller font size and doesn't allow high contrast colors as the default is black on gray with the dark theme in KDE. It also only allows left and right arrows for moving through the book while Calibre uses up/down, left/right, or pgup/pgdn so whatever keys seem reasonable to you are going to work. The RSS was 762M which wasn't great but wasn't the real problem. Rumours of Arianna using less RAM than Calibre seem exaggerated.

Librem5

On my Librem5 phone with Plasma Mobile Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 both the initial setup screen and the main screen for selecting a book to read don't work in the width of portrait view on the phone. After putting it in landscape mode it worked, but I couldn't touch on a book title to select it I had to touch on the number of the book at the left of the list box. But once it was loaded everything was fine. On the Librem5 Arianna 25.04.0-1 just worked fine, although only using left/right swipes to change pages instead of up/down was annoying.

Furilabs FLX1s

On my Furilabs FLX1s with phosh Arianna 25.04.0-1 and Calibre 8.16.2+ds+~0.10.5-3 both gave the same result of not displaying text or images from the book, I'm not sure if it's phosh or some other aspect of the FLX1s configuration at fault.

PinePhonePro

On my PinePhonePro running Debian/Testing with Plasma Mobile Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked without any issue and up/down swipes worked. Calibre 9.5.0+ds+~0.10.5-1 had the initial screen work fine in portrait mode but the main screen was too wide and needed landscape. Also the issue of having to touch the number applied.

Laptop running Debian/Unstable

Calibre 9.6.0+ds+~0.10.5-2 and Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked quite nicely on a Thinkpad running Debian/Unstable. One thing I discovered while testing it is that Calibre supports the CTRL-PLUS and CTRL-MINUS key combinations to change font sizes and that also works on the version in Debian/Trixie. Arianna doesn't support CTRL-PLUS/MINUS.

Conclusion

The problems I had were Arianna on a laptop, everything on the Furilabs FLX1s, and Calibre's UI not being well adjusted for mobile devices.

29 Mar 2026 12:29pm GMT