The other books I have reviewed so far have had rather lengthy reviews. This book is a little bit different. I am going to attempt a rather brief review and see how I feel about it afterwards.
This is a remarkably difficult and amazing book to read. Sometimes the effects are mind blowing and other times you get the feeling the effect is a little bit childish and perhaps something is lost in translation or perhaps it is cultural. But I have never had so much fun fooling myself over and over again with the items in this book! I would recommend it ONLY to those who will be doing magic remotely, or to those who want to fool themselves and experience a childlike joy that we had upon our initial introduction to magic.
This book is a compilation of translated tricks that Juan delivered to audiences over the radio in Spanish. So you can imagine that a little bit will be lost to an English speaking audience. That is understandable. Many of the tricks float around an oil and water idea with cards separating. I enjoyed playing with many of the effects and some of them just left me bored, so I skipped them. But one thing is for sure, this book is a treasure trove of cool trick that will fool YOU! I've rarely come across a book like this.
Anyone who reads this bad boy, and likes it, would do well to get copies of Impuzzibilities and Further Impuzzibilities by Jim Steinmeyer. Both are very cheap and have very fun routines!
If you have every wanted to magic over the phone then the set of three books mentioned will be a treasure trove!
*Also if anyone has any other titles similar to these in nature please let me know! I'd love to read, review, and recommend them if they are good! Even individual items from magazines would be nice. Thanks!!*
So in short, this book will teach you the tricks by following along exactly as written, I first did them with my partner beside me following my reading from the book, cards in hand, and they all worked! I tried again with a conference call and found the tricks from Verbal Magic were better received than those from the Impuzzibilities books but I am sure that it was presentational and some refining could turn all these tricks into amazing miracles! That being said I would not be surprised to see many YouTube videos performing the tricks from Verbal Magic. It would be nice to see Juan doing a few videos like that online for us to follow along so the impostors get squashed before they ruin this brilliant, fun book!
For a nice change of magic, go get this book, then call a buddy on his cell phone and make sure he's got some business cards or better yet a deck of cards!
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