I purchased Orion elsewhere, but I felt so strongly about it that I'd like to leave a review on
Penguin.
Like many, I was first introduced to Phedon’s thinking via Proteus. It’s a solid
piece of mentalism, and I got many miles out of it. I then heard about Orion, and hearing it was
Phedon’s magnum opus, I started looking into it. I spent a few months deliberating over this
purchase. It’s a heavy investment. I read all 17 pages of the Magic Café thread, all 20 pages of
Michael Murray’s overview of Orion, any video review I could find, Madison Hagler’s Orion reviews on
his site, and I even interviewed several of the contributors in Orion itself! I wanted to be sure.
My interviews told me that 1., People think Phedon’s work is incredible, and 2., Phedon is
a deeply kind, humble person. Given that everyone I spoke with held these things to be true, I took
the plunge and read Orion. Prior to reading, I was wary of the praise that Orion ‘is set to become a
modern classic.’ That’s some high praise, so I was afraid of being disappointed. But despite heading
into Orion with these high expectations, Phedon exceeded all of them. I now agree with the sentiment
that Orion will become a modern classic. There’s a reason why it won the Book of the Year in 2021:
all its readers have recognised that the tools contained within enable us to create very powerful
experiences for our audiences. These are the types of experiences that—excellently performed, of
course—stay with people forever.
In this review, I don’t aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of its contents. If you’d like something comprehensive, I recommend reading Michael
Murray’s 20-page overview on the Café thread or visiting Madison Hagler’s reviews on his site. Here,
my only aim is to serve as a voice that the extreme praise Orion has received is warranted. I’m here
to tell you, as someone who has tested this material in both casual and professional environments,
this investment is more than worthwhile. In the often hype-ridden and praise-saturated world of our
craft, it can be hard to know whether price tags are justified. So, I hope my review will provide
peace of mind to those on the fence. Even when dissected by the critical-by-default perspective of
my own, I don’t think I could give enough praise to Phedon’s work here. In fact, it seems to be a
consensus amongst the owners of this work that Phedon has under-priced his masterpiece.
My
ratings of magic products tend to average towards the 3-4 star range. I only give 5-star ratings to
those I find perfect or very close. And of those 5-star ratings, very few products get me off my
chair to write a review. Orion is unquestionably worth every star. Few, if any works I’ve read
contain as many useable pieces as this. As I make my way through books, I usually find myself
rejecting most pieces for stylistic, methodological, or strength-of-climax reasons, usually coming
out of a book with 1-3 effects (at most) I’d actually find myself using. For me, Orion was an
outlier. The best way I can describe it is by sharing something I told my friend. ‘In every
performance from now on, I’ll use at least one thing from Orion, whether it be a ploy, ruse, or
subtlety, a means of better connecting with my audience, one of the many performance-ready pieces,
or one of the structures of the effects.’
Every one of the 20+ performance-ready pieces is
rich with subtleties, useable theory, well-designed structure, and powerful climaxes. It’s so rich,
in fact, that the series demands several rereads to get the most out of it.
Thank you for
your time, and I hope I’ve been of some help to your decision process.
