Random I-Tunes Song of The Moment: Hopelessly Devoted To You By Olivia Newton-John

For $45 bucks you get a well produced high-quality full color 53 page book that doesn't quite live up to the ad copy.

The purpose of the book is provide you with instructions for creating your own illusions geared for family shows. There is really no way to know if these illusions work properly unless I actually build them. The ad copy leads you to believe that you can easily build these. I beg to differ. The only one that's easy is one that I don't think would be very deceptive.

Additionally, in many cases the description referred to certain components as being like such and such component of such and such major illusion. The ad copy claims that you need no prior illusion knowledge. Based on the descriptions in the book I have, I beg to differ. With the exception of one illusion, these are extremely complicated to manufacture.

So how 'bout packin' flat . . . well. You tell me. Is having to lug around a 3 foot tall aquarium packing flat? Many of the illusions required a special table that you'd have to build that I don't think will pack flat. Additionally the directions in many cases refer to having to rivet stuff together and use laser cutters - I'm not making that up.

Ignore the misleading ad copy. Ignore that these things are hard to build. Ignore that they don't pack flat. Are they good illusions? After all, it would probably be cheaper to build the illusion than to buy one already built. So are they good illusions? I don't know. I'd have to build them to see if they worked.

My assumption is that JC Sum has built (or had someone build) each of these illusions. That being the case, it wouldn't have been very hard to put a demo online of each effect just so we could see how well the illusion worked or how good it looked. The pictures in the book where made in a drawing program or something. They were not very clear in a lot of cases. It would have been much better to see actual photographs of the illusions.

If there was some way to know what the illusions looked like then I might be able to make a recommendation, but as we learned in junior high math class, some problems just don't have enough information to be solved.

$45 dollars for a book that can only be 'proven' valuable by spending thousands and thousands of dollars to have a carpenter build 8 illusions is hardly what I would call a gem. A well designed and well written book that teaches you how to build 8 illusions is hardly what I would call rubble. So the truth is somewhere in between.

Final Verdict:
2.5 stars with a Stone Status of Grubble (maybe gem, maybe rubble).