Freshly reprinted by the always excellent Squash Publishing, Mentalissimo might be one of John Bannon's most slept-on books. That's a shame; this is a book loaded with practical, effective, streamlined card mentalism, featuring effects that range from good to outstanding. If you don't already have a copy on your shelf, consider this your sign to grab one before yet another print run passes you by.

If you're a card magician, you've either studied plenty of Bannon's material in the past or have been seriously missing out on some of the tightest constructed modern card magic out there: effects that frequently value subtlety and psychology over hardcore sleights. Bannon is well versed in taking mathematical principles and self-working methodology that could easily feel procedural or flat, and making those tools feel far more appealing for professional performance due largely to the amount of thinking Bannon puts into his structure and suggested scripting.

Personally, I think Bannon is most effective in his mental-leaning card creations; I'm less moved by his studies on, say, the seven-card assembly than I am by his deeply clever, fooling explorations of impossible locations, divinations of thought-of cards, predictions, and wildly unlikely coincidences. You get plenty of that in Mentalissimo: oftentimes, a single effect is offered up with multiple potential handlings and approaches. I like this approach, as it allows the magician to really hone in on a personal approach to the material and what best suits them as a performer.

I'll detail a few personal highlights of the book below.

MUNDO - Many will walk away from this book feeling like this effect is its crown jewel, and it's hard to argue that. This is a minimalist, streamlined rendition of Out of This World using a smaller packet of cards - roughly half the deck or so - that feels so deeply fair every step of the way. There's only one true "move" to speak of to aid in the climactic revelation of the spectator's impossibly separated reds and blacks, but it's so remarkably subtle and simple that it'll fly by anyone completely. Practicing this for the first time in my own hands, I even startled myself when I discovered that I had performed the effect on myself successfully. If you want an Out of This World for more casual settings, this is a particularly exceptional approach. There's also a very clever alternate handling offered up here by Raj Madhok involving the addition of a Joker to the proceedings that some may find to be even better than the original effect as described.

AK-47 - This has appeared in a handful of other Bannon releases before - including his book Destination Zero - but when an effect is this strong and clever in its construction, why not share it as much as possible? In essence, this is a surprisingly direct revelation of a merely thought-of card that's completely impromptu, uses a shuffled deck, and features a rock solid structure and devious method. The effect won't always look 100% the same, and I personally believe there are a few possible endings to this trick that feels just a little less punchy than I'd like; but the pain-to-glory ratio on this one is still impressive. You'd benefit from some well defined acting beats as well; if you're unable to sell certain moments of the effect as being what you say they are, things could get very ropey.

LINE OF SIGHT REDUX - I completely overlooked Line of Sight when it was originally published in Bannon's neoclassic Dear Mr. Fantasy due to its almost too-simple methodology. But in rereading it in Mentalissimo with a slightly different yet equally direct handling to boot, something shifted for me. A spectator simply peeks at a card in the centre of the deck while the magician's head is turned, and the magician subsequently hands the cards to the spectator to shuffle. The peeked-at card is then revealed in eerie, impossible fashion. it's really the presentational hook (which I won't detail here) that sells what is a pretty standard method and handling of a selected card revelation.

PROXY SHOCK - This is an excellent worker's piece that begins from a shuffled deck in use. While the magician turns their head, the deck is spread between the hands with the faces of the cards towards the spectator, and they're asked to think of a card they see. The magician genuinely has no idea what cards the spectator could have seen, let alone which one they zeroed in on. The deck is then shuffled, and the magician immediately attempts to divine the thought-of card by spreading through and committing to one. It's revealed that the card the magician pegged is not, in fact, the mental selection; however, impossibly, the wrong card is then found to have changed into the thought-of card a moment later. A simple move - one Bannon uses often - does most of the work here and, even though it occurs at what could be an inopportune moment, it flies because it happens on a natural offbeat. This is the perfect impromptu card effect to have in your arsenal for those quick-and-dirty "show me a trick" moments.

AFTER SHOCK - The method for this is more or less identical to Proxy Shock, but without the magical moment of the magician getting the card wrong and changing it to the correct one. Instead, this handling skips that transformation beat in favour of a direct revelation of the thought-of card, where the move to switch the card for the selection is done in a different narrative context. If you'd rather nail the card dead-on instead of have a moment of "oops, got it wrong! Let me fix that with magic!" then this will be the handling for you.

COLLUSION - Another piece that has appeared in other Bannon projects, but the thinking here is excellent. Essentially, Bannon has found a means of exploiting an incidental feature of Karl Fulves' Gemini Twins method to facilitate a CAAN-adjacent effect that is almost entirely hands off. In brief: two spectators each think of a number under 20, deal a deck of cards down to their thought-of number, and mark the dealt-to spots with two face-up Jokers. The cards immediately beside each Joker - let's say they're the Four of Diamonds and Jack of Clubs - are used to construct the value and suit of a card: for instance, the value of the Four of Diamonds and suit of the Jack of Clubs are used to construct the Four of Clubs. Then, impossibly, both spectators' thought-of numbers are added together, and that combined total is dealt to in the deck. The card sitting at that combined total is revealed to be the Four of Clubs. Self-working, requires only a minimal setup, and - though the effect in person is more straightforward than it reads - this is probably best in the hands of really engaging performers who can make some pretty hefty strings of dealing not feel like a slog.

PROXIMITY - I love the thinking here. The deck is thoroughly shuffled by the spectator and they're asked to merely think of any card they'd like; they don't remove or even look at a card. The deck is handed to the magician, who then attempts to read the spectator's mind. Strangely, the magician commits to his guess by removing two cards rather than one before finally asking what card the spectator thought of. The deck is spread through and the thought-of card is found still sitting in the middle; again, peculiar. But then the true nature of the effect is revealed: the two cards the magician set aside are revealed to be the precise mates for the cards sitting directly on either side of the thought-of card in the middle of the deck. If this reads a little confusingly, believe me when I say the effect feels quite direct in action and I like that this goes in a different, more unexpected direction from your standard thought-of card revelation: instead of revealing the thought-of card, you're revealing the two cards that sandwich it. Once again, Bannon shows his gift for strong effects with streamlined methods devised from shuffled decks.

ROCK THE 'VOQUE - Bannon shares some very useful thoughts on equivoque here, then explains a clever effect in which a card mentally constructed by the spectator is found to have been sandwiched as a prediction between two face-up Jokers in the middle of the deck before the effect even began. A couple of elegant equivoque beats here take you far enough into the construction of the card to cunningly narrow down the spectator's selection possibilities, leaving the last few choices the spectator makes to be completely free ones. There are two handlings of revealing the card that are detailed: the first one is sleight-light but very discrepant, and the second one is a touch more technical but has the advantage of being less visually discrepant. I like the latter more, and if you can do the intermediate-level move it requires, you may like it more too.

BLANK THOUGHT REMIX - This effect was later put out as a standalone release under the title Paint It Blank. Milking a surprising amount of magical moments out of a single gaffed card, the effect goes like this: two Jokers are tabled and the spectator freely thinks of a card. The magician mentions that the tabled Jokers actually have an invisible card sandwiched between them. In an instant, the invisible card becomes a visible blank card. That visible blank card then inexplicably changes into the thought-of card. A dead simple method, and a super strong effect. If you don't have the required gaffed card hanging around at home, you'll be tempted to source one out so you can try this.


Not every piece of Mentalissimo appealed to me. I was less moved by sections of the book like The Slidewinder Variations, which employs a rather simple and casual-looking switch in the context of numerous approaches to the revelation of a thought-of card. These aren't the only effects in the book where a switch is executed just before a revelation, but this particular handling - to me - feels like it's occurring at a moment where there's likely to be a lot of heat on the card you're about to switch. To be fair, Bannon talk a bit about how to 'get ahead' of your spectator on the revelation so they aren't burning you at the wrong time, but the technique nonetheless feels a little too cozy to me (though it's utilized more effectively in some variations than others). There are far better and more direct ways of achieving this sort of effect, and some of those better ways are even published in this book!

I also personally think Bannon's CLEAN OUT OF SIGHT - which uses an extremely clever, self-working mathematical principle to narrow down a freely thought-of card from a thoroughly shuffled packet of 24 cards - is actually a bit of a step backwards from the effect its based on: Sort of Psychic from Destination Zero. While this version uses a larger bank of cards and therefore a wider range of possible mental selections, the higher number of cards makes the handling feel more procedural than it needs to be, and the final revelation necessitates the magician getting the glory rather than the spectator in the way that Sort Of Psychic allows for.

Also, be forewarned: though there are many exceptions, a great deal of the material in Mentalissimo, at its core, centres on one key effect: a spectator thinks of a card, and the magician divines it. While the pathways to getting there have some solid variety, don't expect to come away from Mentalissimo with an extremely diverse array of new effects in your arsenal. However, if you love this plot the way I do, having a bank of different methods suited to different situations may feel like an asset, or at least an inspiring study of the number of ways a creator can riff on a single core effect.

Quibbles aside, there's a gold mine of excellent material and thinking within these pages. Mentalissimo is written in Bannon's familiar conversational style, which makes learning the effects a clean and easy thing. Useful moves, subtleties, and structural ideas provide just as much value as the tricks themselves, and there are plenty of great tricks to be found here. This book makes a great companion to Bannon's 2023 release Very Hush-Hush, another book of card mentalism. While I prefer Very Hush-Hush - I find that book's material has a bit more variance in both plot and method - there's plenty to love about Mentalissimo too.

Get it through Squash Publishing and select magic dealers!

Another standout piece I omitted from the above review is MISREMEMBERING JACK: a streamlined take on a really clever Jack Parker trick from 52 Memories that goes in a different direction from Parker's original.

The effect: a Joker is placed face-up in the centre of the face-down deck to divide the deck into two separate portions. Two spectators are each invited to select and peek at a card; one from above the Joker and one from below to ensure that both cards are 100% different. Then, with literally no moves or holdouts or funny business, each spectator is handed their respective half of the deck and asked to retrieve their selections. Neither one can find their card; it seems as though both selections have impossibly vanished from the deck.

But then, the truth is revealed: both spectators are asked to name which card they selected, and they discover that they both somehow selected the same card! However, it's a card that wasn't even possible for selection in the first place, as it's been sitting in the card box all along.

The effect really does look this fair, and is open to myriad presentational angles. A common gaffed card does so much heavy lifting. It allows you to cleanly force the same card twice in a pretty fair way using a simple sleight, then make that card completely vanish from the deck and reappear in the card box with no sleights or moves (no palming required!). The effect ends totally clean, too, with a fully examinable deck. This is a devious banger.

Thank you for your great review.

Thank you for a great review. It's great that the book finally gets reprinted.

This is a wonderful review, helpful and insightful, thank you so much for writing it! After reading it I have the book on order and am excited to dive in.

Agreed. A great review for a great book.

Thank you for the review. I have Mentalissimo, read through it quickly with hopes something would catch my eye. Your review brings into focus things I overlooked. Amazing what a different perspective can bring into view. Thank you again.

This a very creative book, its so fun

Its the construction aspect that I am drawn to with Bannon's work. There is a gentleness to his approach I really like. A bit like a good painting, he is aware of the spaces and letting the effect "breath"