The Magician's Apprentice (Hardcover)

~ Trudi Canavan (Author) "There was no fast and painless way to perform an amputation, Tessia knew..." (more)
Key Phrases: border leys, higher magician, city magicians, Lord Dakon, Apprentice Tessia, Emperor Vochira (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This prequel to Canavan's Black Magician trilogy (The Magicians' Guild, etc.) fails to distinguish itself from other magical coming-of-age tales. Tessia treads the well-worn path of a girl in a low-tech monarchy, determined to be a healer like her father but discouraged from pursuing a career. When her insistence on practicing medicine brings her up against the arrogant Sachakan wizard Ashaki Takado, Tessia discovers a natural talent for magic in self-defense. She hires on with magician Lord Dakon, competing with his more experienced apprentice and hoping to combine her powers with her interest in healing. Meanwhile, the encroaching Sachakan army threatens Tessia's hometown, forcing her thoughts to turn to war. Although the plot is well paced and Tessia is a sympathetic protagonist, Canavan never manages to make the world and other characters distinctive or memorable. (Feb.)
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Review

Praise for Trudi Canavan: 'A wonderfully and meticulously detailed world, and an edge-of-the-seat plot, this book is a must for lovers of good fantasy' Jennifer Fallon 'Canavan is a natural storyteller' Emerald City --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Orbit (February 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316037885
• ISBN-13: 978-0316037884
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #66,188 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking? Not unless you count yawns., February 1, 2009

By	Theoden Humphrey "Dusty" (Oregon, US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weak plot dragged down by political message, February 23, 2009

By	Ruth "at www.fantasyliterature.com" (Idaho Falls, ID USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, March 4, 2009

By	Cheryl A. Reynolds "Spuddie" (Minneapolis, MN, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

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.