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180 of 201 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A cozy fantasy, November 18, 2004
If you enjoy cozy mysteries that contain very little violence, sex, profanity, or even blood, you might also enjoy this cozy fantasy. By the end of "The Magicians' Guild," the bad guy is revealed, order is restored to the magical community, and the heroine and her friend from the Thieves' Guild appear to at least have a chance of living happily ever after. There are a few loose ends, but this book is the first of the 'Black Magician' trilogy, so a teaser is to be expected.
If this is your first fantasy, "The Magician's Guild" is a fairly decent read. If it's your hundredth, then you'll recognize the plot, background, and characters: poor, but courageous heroine is cursed with a magical talent that is getting stronger by the day, and is not under her control. The only people who can save her belong to the hated Magician's Guild and she would rather die than deal with those meatballs. Her friends in the Thieves' Guild hide her as long as they can, but eventually her uncontrollable magic is exploding walls and setting whole blocks of slum on fire. The heroine finally gets with the program in the Magicians' Guild, and much to her surprise discovers that some of the practitioners are actually pretty decent folks.
Most of the story is taken up by the heroine's struggle to keep hating the magicians, in spite of the fact that the reader can spot from a million miles off that she's going to become one of them.
Cozies tend not to have much in the way of suspense, complex characters, or imaginative settings, but if they are your cup of tea, then "The Magicians' Guild" is recommended reading.
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30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a charming book!, June 18, 2004
I've read so many fantasy novels lately that I'm on the run for new authors...I'm so glad I found Trudi Canavan! This book just flew, and left me panting for the next. Sonea is a slum girl who, accidentaly during the yearly 'purge' of unwanted poor folk from her city, throws a rock at a magician and breaks through the barrier. This sends both the slums and the Magicians into chaos as Sonea seeks to control her new found powers and hide from the magicians and the magicians squabble amoung themselves about what to do about this. They never test people from the slums for magic. A good half of the book is this cat and mouse chase between Sonea and her allies and the magicians...and the rest...well I won't give the plot away. Canavan is excellant at creating characters. Sonea is vivid in her terror and her stuborness and the loyalty of her friend Cery is touching. The Thief she hides with for a while is an intriuginig character as is the head of the Magicians, Akkarin. There are good magicians and not so good ones, but they are all so colourfully created that I know them well in my mind. Her two most central magicians, Rothen and Dannyl, so remind me of excentric proffessors at a universit...they certainly made me smile. In anycase, this is a charming, wonderful book. I would highly recommend it to anyone.
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70 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This Fantasy Novel Lacks Real Magic, July 26, 2004
I'm not an avid fantasy reader but everything about Trudi Canavan's first book, the Magician's Guild, feels cliched. First of all there is a Magician's Guild and a Thief's Guild, and I have played enough RPGs to know those are fantasy staples. Mix that lightly with a vaguely mideval European flavored world. Dash in some characters that haven't fully ripened. The end result is a plot that feels half-baked.
In this kingdom every year the king has the magician's guild chase the poor and downtrodden out of the city. Needless to say, the poor don't care much of this turn of events but they are no match against the forces of the magicians' magic barrier. That is until a slum girl named Sonea uses the latent magical talent within her to penetrate the barrier. Suddenly this unassuming girl is running for her life, thinking that the magicians will try to kill her because they don't want anyone outside the good-old-boy network to have magic. The Guild Magician's must track Sonea down before her uncontrolled power destroys the city.
The plot itself is okay, but it's like Canavan was trying to stretch a the story to twice the length it needed to be. The characters never really seemed to come alive either. The first half of the story is pretty dull because very little of interest happens to Sonea as she hides out and the guild rushes around trying to find her.
The second part fares a little better when Sonea begins to learn the ways of magic, but it remains a very flat and dull book. The story ends just as it seems ready to roll. I'm a little suprised that what was a little throw-away detail is what will become the plot that will carry the rest of the triology. Maybe the next book will be better because it may have a larger focus, but I'm not eager to find out.
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