Customer Reviews

The Magician's Apprentice

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was excited to read this book because I've been looking at the Black Magician trilogy for a while, but have never gotten to it. My excitement about the book didn't last long. I think it took me about fifty pages, out of this nigh-600 page book, to realize something: this book is boring. Staggeringly boring.

My one caveat with this is that it is possible that this stand-alone novel doesn't really stand alone; the book might have been utterly fascinating for people who have read the Black Magician trilogy, and so this review should be well-salted before swallowing. Although after reading other reviews posted here, I will also concede that this might be a better, more interesting book for female readers, which I am not. But I have read and enjoyed many "chick lit" books, so I think this is more than a simple gender gap.


(A second caveat: here there be spoilers.)


The book could just as well be named "The Magician's Anticlimax," because everything that happens is built up and then allowed to simply deflate like a leaking bicycle tire. For the first half of the book, everything happens off stage: a messenger comes and tells the magicians that their town has been invaded and sacked; they go to look, and the title character, Tessia, learns that her parents have been killed, but were already buried, so she can skip the whole grieving process. (Not that the book makes her out as heartless; it doesn't. But the story just keeps skipping along past what should be a monumentally difficult loss.) Then as they pursue the invaders, coming on town after town that has been sacked just before they get there, two of their number are captured and tortured, and the point of view characters wait while someone else goes to investigate -- and then refuses to tell the gruesome details. The most important secret of magic, the ability to draw strength from others and store it for one's own use (a fairly horrifying vampiric act, and one that is completely glossed over despite the fact that bloodletting is part of the process), is held back at first, until it is taught to the apprentices in a scene lasting about half a page, when they find out it isn't very complicated at all. The majority of the book is a description of the Kyralian magicians chasing after the invading army, but for most of that time, they do nothing but follow and discuss what they will do if and when they ever catch them. They do love their discussions in this book. Of course, since the point of view characters are the apprentices, they don't take part in the discussions. So for the reader, most of the book is about watching groups of men gather to talk about strategy and other topics which you wouldn't care about even if you could hear them.

And speaking of strategy, the author should have learned some. Not that I expect or want every fantasy book to be a military text, but this book is about war, and so should have at least some insight. Despite spending countless hours debating, the only strategy either side uses in this book is, "Let's wait until we have more men than the other guys." The battle plans are simply this: everybody line up and zap them while shielding yourself. The winner of every conflict is the side that has managed to store more magical strength. And despite an apprentice making an important discovery -- non-magical weapons, especially the element of surprise, can be used to great effect against magicians (He sets a storehouse full of "whitewater" on fire, which forces the magicians pursuing him to use up their stored power shielding themselves from the blast -- which I assume makes whitewater something like kerosene? Turpentine? Maybe petroleum? Oh no, the glossary tells me it is "pure spirits made from tugors [a tugor is a "parsnip-like root]." So there you go.), they never pick up on it, and the next fight is still a magical game of Red Rover. Ten guys with bows, hidden in a forest -- or one sneaky guy at night with a knife -- could take out every magician in this book, and yet nobody has ever figured that out; not even those whom the magicians have oppressed and enslaved. Hard to believe. As is the great magical revelation in this book, the title character's discovery of how to heal with magic. I could understand the magicians in this world not knowing complex things like the inner workings of the body, which is part of Tessia's special insight into healing, as she is the daughter and formerly the apprentice of a healer -- and the parts when she uses her specialized knowledge to heal are some of the most interesting in the book -- but the big secret of actually helping the body to heal itself? Put magical power into the body -- which then heals itself. I refuse to believe that generations of magicians have never figured that out until now. Just like I refuse to believe that nobody has come up with a better way to fight than "Line up and shoot."

For my own self, I think I have my answer about the author's trilogy set in the same world: no thank you.

Prequel to the Black Magician fantasy trilogy, taking place several hundred years before the first book in that series. This is the story of Tessia, a commoner in Kyralia who is a healer's daughter and who wants nothing more than to follow in her father's footsteps. But women in Kyralia are not allowed to be healers, so when an episode of attempted rape by a visiting Sachakan magician reveals that Tessia is a natural magician, she becomes a second apprentice to Lord Dakon, who holds the ley her family lives in.

First learning control of her magic lest she cause serious damage to her surroundings, Tessia's goal is to figure out a way to incorporate healing with her magic, which has to that point not been done. A few months after she is apprenticed, she heads off to Imardin, the capital city, with Lord Dakon and his first apprentice (who is of noble blood and doesn't like Tessia much) to meet the king, beginning a series of political intrigues and growing experiences for Tessia, both as a magician and as a person.

I really wanted to love this book as I did the previously-published trilogy, but it really fell flat. Canavan is a good writer, with an easy-to-read style, but the story in this book was just....well, rather ho-hum. None of the characters really stirred me to either liking or hating them much, and while the story did explain some of the events that occurred later in the trilogy, it wasn't done with the panache I had expected. The best I can say about the book is that it was okay. I don't think writing prequels is an easy thing, and I will be on the lookout for more work by this author, but I hope she's planning something new.

Trudi Canavan revisits the world she created in the Black Magician Trilogy, this time giving us an intriguing look at Kyralia's and Sachaka's history.

"The Magician's Apprentice" takes place an untold amount of time before we meet Sonea and follow her adventures in the Magician's Guild. The protagonist is Tessia, a commoner who lives on the border between her country of Kyralia and the ever-threatening country of Sachaka. With a lifelong knowledge and love of healing, Tessia desires to follow in the footsteps of her father, the area healer, but her plans are abruptly changed when a confrontation with a visiting Sachakan magician reveals magical powers that she didn't know she had. Because Tessia has natural magical ability, she must be apprenticed to a practicing magician, the local lord of her area, Lord Dakon. But while Tessia is trying to figure out the world of magic and social status, an invasion by Sachakan magicians forces her and her friends into a conflict that will have very far-reaching consequences.

Taken as a stand-alone book, it's not bad. "The Magician's Apprentice" is a fairly standard coming-of-age, war between magicians fantasy novel. It's a fairly quick read that is interesting enough to have you turning the pages.

The real gem of this book is the back history it provides for those already familiar with the world of the Black Magician Trilogy. I do feel that Canavan's original trilogy is far superior to this book, and was also disappointed that she started it out the same way (female protagonist, poor commoner, discovering her natural abilities and thrust into a world beyond her social awareness). I thought she could have been a little more original than that.

But what we get out of "The Magician's Apprentice" is the reason behind the things we see in the trilogy. We find out why and how the Magician's Guild began, and get to know the original teachers in the guild. We learn how the magical healing skill was developed, along with other items of magical knowledge that figure into the trilogy. And Canavan gives us both sides of the story - there are good people and bad people on both sides of the war.

If you're already familiar with the Black Magician trilogy, then "The Magician's Apprentice" should definitely be on your to-read list. If this is your first time reading Canavan's work, I'd start with the trilogy and then move to this prequel, it makes for a richer reading experience.

The Magician's Apprentice is the stand-alone prequel to Trudi Canavan's The Black Magician trilogy. It tells the story of young healer and magician apprentice Tessia who is caught up in the struggle between her native Kyralia and the Sachakan invaders who are trying to reestablish rule over their prior province. I haven't read the trilogy and am evaluating the book as the solo novel it is purported to be.

The first sentence of The Magician's Apprentice reaches out and grabs your attention. Unfortunately, the story goes down hill from there. You join the story as Tessia is assisting her father in an amputation. She is in training to become a healer, but when her magical ability surfaces she is forced to give up her hopes of following in her father's footsteps and is apprenticed to Lord Dakon. The plot meanders along without a real sense of urgency until the very end, by which point I was so irritated with the book that I didn't care any more.

I was annoyed with the book for a number of reasons. First, Canavan manages to make the use of magic incredibly prosaic. There is no sense of wonder or fantasy in her writing, even though the main characters are all magicians. Her magic usage focuses on everyday purposes, such as preventing conception, or cleaning. And while the case could be made that in a world where magic existed it would be used for such purposes, the writing about the magic was boring. Shouldn't reading about magic be, well, magical?

The mundane use of magic extended to warfare. Canavan treats her magicians as cannon fodder, having them stand in opposing lines firing bolts of power at each other until one sides' shields fail. If the entire army consists of magicians, can't you come up with a better idea than a quasi-medieval battle of two armies shooting magical arrows at each other? The system of magical warfare felt like a colossal failure of imagination.

Another major problem with the book is the heavy-handed political lessons that Canavan is trying to weave through her story. It felt like she was trying to force home a lesson about several radical political philosophies, such as "slavery is bad," "capitalism is good," "gays are human beings" and "women should be treated as equals." At one point the characters engage in a discussion that is a thinly veiled debate about the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. Canavan's need to drive home a political message causes her to introduce a feminist subplot halfway through the book that is only tangentially related to the rest of the book and is completely unnecessary to the main storyline. The plot of The Magician's Apprentice was secondary to the political message, which left the novel feeling like a thinly disguised political theory text book.

Maybe this book, and especially the feminist subplot, would have been more interesting and meaningful to someone who has enjoyed The Black Magician trilogy, but this book will do nothing to draw in additional readers to Trudi Canavan's fantasy world. The problems with pacing, flat characters, and overbearing political message left me wanting to quit half way through. I kept reading hoping it would get better, and while the pace improved, the manipulative plot techniques and overbearing lessons increased my irritation the longer I read. I cannot recommend The Magician's Apprentice.

I truly enjoyed The Black Magician's Trilogy, which gave me high hopes for this book since it was supposed to be a prequel of sorts.

This book is total, utter crap. It has, quite literally, an identical plot to that of The Black Magician's Trilogy: lower class girl discovers she has magic, and she becomes instrumental in fighting off the evil lords from another country. I was not at all impressed. It is the exact same story with almost the exact same characters.

I read about 1/3 of the book before returning it.

I have no idea how this book was published, Canavan is essentially plagiarizing herself. Some of the passages are eerily similar - with almost identical phrases and sentences. Publishing this novel was a cheap ploy to get fans to buy into another novel about an already covered storyline.

If you read The Black Magician's Trilogy, don't waste your time or money. This is a poor rip off of what made an amazing trilogy.

If you haven't read The Black Magician's Trilogy and have no interest in doing so, I'm sure this would be a lovely read.

It was called "The Dragons of Pern-Dune-Mists of Avalon/Forest House-Wheel of Time" with a little "Lord of the Rings" thrown in.

I'm not trying to be uncharitable here, admitedly this is the first book of Trudi Canavan's I have read and anyone who has been a fan of the books mentioned, if only because they are true fantasy buffs will be more than happy to jump on the next great Fantastical Epic. ( at 587 pages your weekend is set!)

And tho' I have enjoyed those previous books I don't remember them being as difficult to get into as "The Magician's Apprentice. I was really relieved when I saw other reviewers make comments such as 'dull' & 'boring' because then I knew it was not just me in the wrong frame of mind.

You might want to just check this one out from the library.

Since I adored the Black Magician trilogy I was, obviously, very excited to get a chance to read this prequel. Unfortunately that exhilaration lasted a whopping twenty or thirty pages into this unremarkable tome. To be honest I was shocked. Canavan is a far better writer than is evident here. Perhaps she was writing to a too-short deadline, or possibly she simply got tired of the material, but for whatever reason the magic of her earlier books simply isn't apparent in this lackluster tale.

To be fair, there really is a lot of promise in the plot and many of the characters have a fair amount of potential, but somehow it never comes together into anything worth reading. I do like the concept of the heroine Tessia struggling against a highly paternal, overly misogynist society to rise above her station. Further, her insight in discovering healing magic through her superior knowledge of the human body learned from time helping her father perform his healing arts is an interesting thing. Unfortunately that's simply not enough to hold the story together. I don't mind setting constraints so that characters who think outside the box have an advantage, but the powers that be in this book act like naïve children, particularly during the war.

Overall it's a boring, unremarkable read. I can't recommend the Black Magician trilogy highly enough, yet I cannot recommend this tepid prequel at all. I expected so much more... sigh.

Lawrence Kane
Author of Blinded by the Night, among other titles

This is the first story that I have read by Trudi Canavan. I think fans of her previous work will enjoy this story more than I did. To her credit, it was interesting enough to finish, but a bit of a long trudge. Magic isn't very interesting in this realm, more than skill, having stored power, is what is important. So basically having the stronger battery wins the fight. Also, many battles take place outside of the story so we only see the aftermath. That's ok as I'm sure they would be grim to read about, but it slows down the story. Also, I felt like I was being hit over the head with ideas that I wished had just flowed a little more naturally as part of the story. This was probably the point, but by the end, the "good" guys were as bad as the "bad" guys, so I lost heart with the story. The title could have been more creative, too. As I was telling people about the book, people kept saying that they had read it and I had to keep telling them that I had an advance readers copy and it was just being published now.

I've given books with more egregious flaws higher ratings than this: _Wicked Widow_ got four stars from me despite its Vanzamania; _Error World_ picked up a quartet even though it was an odd mishmash; I gave four to a Forgotten Realms Elminster book, seriously. Even with much bigger things I could point to as Ways In Which the Book Drove Me Nuts, they did something _Magician's Apprentice_ didn't manage for most of its 500-plus page length. They kept me entertained.

Trudi Canavan can write. It's obvious she can. Her settings are good, her characters (some of them) are interesting--I liked Dakon particularly--and some elements of her worldbuilding are strong. Sachaka in general came across as exotic and colorful, although I wouldn't want to live there! Certain details (like the differences in how buildings are designed compared to Kyralia, and vice versa) brought the place to life. The author's skill carried me along for about two hundred pages.

As I realized at about the halfway point that the story was a big bland sandwich, I still never found a problem so offensive I had an excuse to throw it across the room. The little problems just add up to leech everything that should've been great about it away, leaving a book where almost everything interesting happens off-camera, the villains are not threatening, the heroes seem incompetant, and the use of magic is incredibly dull. The text makes it sound so easy to use you wonder how anybody could possibly be an apprentice for years, and there's nothing like creativity or ingenuity in its practice. The discoveries Tessia makes sound like something that should have been worked out *long ago* if anybody had any sense.

There was one flaw that *was* egregious, that would have damaged the novel even if it had been otherwise perfect. About midway through the book you're suddenly introduced to a new female protagonist completely unconnected to the main characters, who goes through a sub-story about how awful men are and how terrible marriage is and the only way the world won't suck for women is if they're in control. Maybe this subplot has more to do with the Black Magician books than this one; it never connects here and reads like an authorial soapbox. If the message had been handled a little more lightly, I might have enjoyed this story separately--some of the characters are actually more interesting than the main storyline's cast. It should've been a separate novella or something, though. Instead it pads out a book that already feels over-padded.

I'm hesitant to pick up Trudi Canavan's other books because I don't want to be smacked upside the head with more preaching, but not because I was left with an impression she couldn't, with a different choice of viewpoint characters, turn out a pretty fine story. While I can't recommend buying this (I give it three stars instead of two mostly because the second half did pick up somewhat, and I finished it in a couple days after picking it up and putting it down for over a week) unless one is already a fan and wants more background on her trilogy, it's not exactly *bad*. It really isn't. Just dull, and whether that's a worse thing for a book to be is up to you.

I thought this book would be about the magician's apprentice.

At first, it does seem that way. After a while though, it seems to be more about war. The apprentice becomes a person who was also involved in the war, on and off, when asked to heal. During the war, when there is finally a mention about the magician's apprentice, it's about her wanting to heal people and about other people checking her out and her being frustrated at a guy (who she obviously like). If I wanted to read about teenage-level crushes I'd read other books. At least in such books the person would be a major character, not a person who also exists in the story.

This book looks to be about warfare then, I suppose. But if I'm going to write a book about warfare, I would at least learn some basic strategies.

I've never read books where 200 people is considered a country's army. And all battles are about 2 so-called armies facing each other and throwing magical power at each other. And you'll have to imagine the magical power yourself as it's not really described. Most of the time you are just told the effects, like people burning up or something. It's like 2 groups of people trying to brute-force each other without tactics. Let's just see which side runs out of magic power first, is the game.

And if you have an "army" of magicians, you definitely cannot utilize other strategies of warfare that require more mundane methods, like moving your troops to flank the enemy, or perhaps poison their water or food supply. No, the army must advance and retreat as one. When they fight, they must never position themselves strategically, say place some troops on the flanks, but instead, stand in a line and do a face-off. When magic runs out, they must seek more magic and there doesn't seem to be any non-magician soldiers in the world who can fight, dig trenches, run behind the enemy lines to wreak havoc or lay ambushes.

I recommend reading Sun Tzu's The Art Of War if strategy is a weak area.

Truly unbelievable.