Hello, Anna here (chibi-anna-chan) with a review!
I have been meaning to write up a review or two here for a long time, but I haven't really got round to it. Anyhoo, this will be a short review of one of Trudi Canavan's books. I have never read any of her books before, I just happened to find this in the library and thought I'd give it a go.
Title(s): The Magicians Apprentice
Author: Trudi Canavan
Genre: fantasy, adventure
Main Characters: Tessia, Dakon, Jayan, Takado.
Warnings: There are some battle scenes, but nothing graphic at all.
So, The Magicians Aprpentice. Trudi has written a number of fantasy trilogies, with this one being a prequel to her Black Macician trilogy. As I said, I haven't read those books, but I felt that I may as well read the prequel first as an introduction. I had read a few good reviews of her trilogies on Goodreads, so I was hopeful for this book.
This is a fantasy book, so you can expect a fair amount of magicians and magic, and later on there are a few magical battles. In this story, magicians are trained from when their magical talent shows itself. Everyone has a small degree of this 'latent talent', but most do not have enough to actually use it themselves. Magicians are often responsible for looking after their village, or in the case of city magicians, their trade and estates. The story starts in Kyralia, in a small village near the border of the country where a young girl named Tessia lives and trains to follow her father's footsteps and become a healer. Unfortunately for her, most people think the only "career" for women is to become a wife and mother, so despite her training and arguing, her dreams do not seem like an option. One day, in a moment of stress, Tessia shows an amazing natural talent for magic. She becomes a magician’s apprentice under Lord Dakon, the local lord, but before Tessia can get used to her new life, war comes to Kyralia.
Overall... I wasn't that impressed. Perhaps it was because I hadn't read her trilogy first, but I just felt that a lot was missing. The book started well, but around the mid-point of the book I was getting rather bored. The characters were really quite bland, they didn't have much depth to them. On one side you have the Kyralians: Tessia, Jayan and Dakon. They are the good-guys/girls. Then on the other side you have the Sachakans: Takado and his allies. They are the baddies. There’s no real depth to any of them. This is offset slightly by the two characters Stara and Hanara, whose own stories could have been more interesting than the main plot if they had been explored in greater depth, but they weren't. The rest of the book is populated by a host of magicians, identifiable only by their names. We get to know none of them, with the exception of Tessia’s master, Dakon. There is nothing to distinguish them from each other, no personality quirks, no specific way of speaking. They are a bunch of cardboard characters running round the countryside chasing enemy magicians. There was a LOT of running around chasing enemy magicians XD
On a more positive note, I did feel the author had put a lot of thought into the way the world she had created was structured. You get a really good feel for the places in the book and the different ways in which the societies work. I just feel there was a lack of tension to draw me to continue reading around the mid third of the book. I don't think things need to be exciting at every moment, but the lack of character interaction and growth made me like the story less.
To be fair, after the mid-third of the book I did start to enjoy it more, because things actually seemed to be happening. Also, by that point Stara's story was moving at a quicker pace, and that balanced things out. Also, I was reading other books at the time, so perhaps my attention was distracted somewhat. I suppose I was just enjoying the other books more, so I read through them first even though I took this one out the library first... XD
I'll give it 3/5 stars I think. I liked it, but it wasn't something I'd really recommend. I suppose I do read rather a lot of fantasy, so I have my favourites hehe.
Kelsey - apologies that my review was a rather negative one! Thanks for letting me guest post ^^ and thanks for reading (if anyone does!) hehe.
