The Novice - Review

First of all, this book is the sequel to the first book I reviewed. If you plan on reading The Magician's Guild, I suggest you don't read this review yet. I won't hide spoilers for either book in the summary part and only hide spoilers for this one in the impressions.

The Facts

Title	The Novice (The Black Magician Trilogy, part 2)
Author	Trudi Canavan
Genre	Fantasy, young adult
Publisher	Orbit Books
Publication date	2002

The Summary

Sonea is now a novice in the Magician’s Guild but has a hard time because the other novices are all members of wealthy families and she grew up in the slums. One novice in particular, Regin, is a vicious bully. He accuses Sonea and her guardian Rothen to have an improper relationship, forcing her to move out of Rothen’s rooms and to the Novice’s Quarters, closer to her bullies. Sonea however is devoted to her studies and gets promoted to a higher class. These novices are friendlier until Regin also gets promoted and frames her for stealing. Sonea could ask for a magician to read her mind and prove her innocence, but this would mean they would find out about High Lord Akkarin practicing black magic. Rothen’s son Dorrien comes to visit his father and befriends Sonea. Together they set a trap to catch Regin trying to frame Sonea for theft again. This and him teaching her levitation and showing her secret places on the Guild grounds brings them closer together.

Meanwhile, Administrator Lorlen learns of murders happening in the slums, murders that show evidence of black magic. He suspects his friend Akkarin is involved, which makes him both worried about Akkarin and everyone else since a black magician is a threat to everyone around him.

At the start of the story, Dannyl is sent to Elyne as Second Ambassador and receives a secret assignment from Lorlen: to investigate ancient magic and retrace Akkarin’s journey in Elyne a few years before. He is assisted by Tayend, a young librarian who used to be Akkarin’s assistant. It is revealed later on that Tayend is a “lad” or homosexual. Dannyl is surprised by this but after a close encounter with death, realizes that he, too, has feelings for Tayend.

Back in the Guild, High Lord Akkarin grows suspicious of his friend Lorlen and his strange behaviour. He force-reads Lorlen’s mind and learns that Sonea, Rothen and Lorlen himself know that Akkarin is a black magician. He takes on Sonea’s guardianship, thus making her a hostage to prevent any of them taking action against him or telling anyone else about his secret. He also gives Lorlen a blood gem, a ring that enables Akkarin to hear and see everything that happens around Lorlen and to mind-speak with him without anyone else hearing.

Sonea is now known as the High Lord’s favorite, even though she is terrified of him and avoids him, and gets bullied more and more by Regin and his friends. She doesn’t defend herself however. Her private Warrior skills teacher, Yikmo, discovers this reluctance to use her powers to defend herself is caused by the fear that she might hurt someone. Akkarin is aware of the bullying but does not step in because he notices Sonea’s powers increase because of it. When Dorrien returns to the Guild, he encourages Sonea to challenge Regin to a formal duel in which she beats him through skill, gaining the respect of the other novices. The story ends when Sonea witnesses Akkarin kill a man from the rival nation Sachaka. The High Lord tells her this was a spy sent to kill him but Sonea doesn’t know whether to believe him, which sets up the story for the third book.

The Impressions

Unlike the first book in this trilogy, The Novice focusses on more than one storyline, in more than one location. I liked this because it allows for more world creation and character development. A nice example of this is Dannyl’s ambassador mission to the nation of Elyne. Not only is he facing the task of retracing the High Lord’s travels, he is also confronted with a different attitude towards homosexuality, and his own feelings. Lorlen has to deal with his inner turmoil too: his best friend turns out to be using black magic, which is forbidden in Kyralia and the Allied Lands, and might also be a serial killer. Add to this the blood gem Akkarin gives him later on which lets the High Lord hear Lorlen's thoughts.

Although the pacing in this book feels higher because of the different storylines, the overal progression is still quite slow. Sonea’s story is filled with her being bullied by Regin and her being afraid of High Lord Akkarin. So when Dorrien visits the Guild and they strike up a friendship, it is a welcome change to finally have something positive happen to Sonea. The romance part is a bit predictable but hey, we’re not reading world class literature here. Back to the bullying now. In my review of the first book I wrote “yes, we get it, Sonea doesn’t have control over her powers”. While reading this book, I kept thinking “yes we get it, Regin is a mean boy.”

Sonea is again rather passive. It is Dorrien who comes up with the plans to deal with Regin. And when Regin and his friends ambush her, Sonea tends to let them hurt her and even curls up on the ground while they hit her with magic strikes. This is not something we’d expect from the main character and heroine of the story. We do get an explanation later why she is reluctant to use her powers. Yet characters are repeatedly mentioned to “use all their power for this or that” indicating it is possible to control how much power you put into your magic strikes. So is Sonea a very determined pacifist or is this a plot hole?

The previous book set up High Lord Akkarin as the Super Bad Guy and this book tries to reinforce this image. He is mysterious and not very talkative, even with his best friend Lorlen. But to me Akkarin doesn’t give off the Super Dangerous vibe. I am not sure if this is on purpose or rather clunky writing. He feels more like a Misunderstood Guy With A Big Secret. Speaking of clunky writing, the amount of chuckling in these books is annoying.

The Conclusion

Like The Magician’s Guild, this book is a nice and easy one to read if you’re into fantasy and young adult novels. The addition of more storylines is very welcome because it creates a more three-dimensional world that does not revolve entirely around one young novice. As with the previous book, my biggest issue is again the slow pace and its repetitiveness, even though it did improve. By now I am curious about Akkarin's story, so on to the final part of the trilogy!

The Magician's Guild - Review

The Facts

Title	The Magician’s Guild (The Black Magician Trilogy, part 1)
Author	Trudi Canavan
Genre	Fantasy, young adult
Publisher	Orbit Books
Publication date	2001

The Summary

Magicians in Kyralia are all members of wealthy families. Every winter they purge the capital’s streets of the slum dwellers (or “dwells”). The story starts when Sonea, a young dwell, joins her friends in throwing rocks at these magicians. A magical shield protects them, but Sonea wishes her rock would pierce the shield. Lo and behold, this happens and Lord Fergun is hit in the head. Both Sonea and the magicians are shocked at this first manifestation of her magical powers. Fearing retaliation, Sonea flees and goes into hiding with the help of her friend Cery and the Thieves, a (literally) underground criminal organisation.

Her powers grow stronger and Sonea doesn’t know how to control them which leads to her accidentally setting fire to her surroundings multiple times. Meanwhile, the magicians are indeed hunting her down. Some, like Lord Fergun, out of anger but others, like Lord Rothen and Lord Dannyl, out of concern that she might hurt herself and other people. One night, Sonea and Cery sneak into the Magician’s Guild, hoping to learn how to control her powers. Their quest is unsuccessful but Sonea witnesses a magician in black robes and covered in blood performing a ritual on a servant. Part one of this book ends when Rothen locates Sonea and convinces her to come to the Guild to learn Control over her powers.

In part two Sonea not only learns how to control her powers but also slowly learns to trust Rothen. She doesn’t really care about staying in the Guild once she’s achieved Control but instead wants to go home to her family. Her newly formed trust is challenged when Fergun sets up a scheme to force Sonea to betray the Guild. His plans are discovered and at the trial Sonea allows Lorlen, the Guild’s Administrator (more or less the second-in-command), to read her mind and witness what Fergun told her. During this truthread however, Lorlen sees the image of the black-robed magician and it is revealed this is in fact Akkarin, the High Lord and Lorlen’s best friend, practicing forbidden black magic. Determined to help the Guild fight this new enemy, Sonea decides to stay with them, under Rothen’s guardianship.

The Impressions

While reading this book, it is important to keep in mind that it is the first part of a trilogy. The villain in this part is rather weak and unimpressive. His scheme to trick Sonea is not menacing and it is hard to understand why she feels afraid. Then again, Sonea seemed a bit passive from time to time. This might be explained by her situation. First she is terrified of her powers and the Guild chasing her, then she is confined to Rothen’s quarters in the Guild while he teaches her how to control those powers. She thinks about escaping or simply leaving the Guild once she’s learned Control, but never really undertakes any action.

I also felt the first part just dragged on and on. Yes, we get it: Sonea doesn’t have control over her powers, she’s a danger to herself and her surroundings and the Guild wants to find her. Do we really need 150 pages of that? That’s half of this book. Time and pages that could’ve been spent on more character development. Or just shorten all three books and make it one big one. Then again, fantasy writers, publishers and readers love their trilogies. I did like the different points of view we get. Among them there’s Sonea’s, Dannyl’s and Rothen’s. This is interesting because we get an insight into the minds of these people, their inner turmoils and motivations. The downside of it is that we immediately know that Rothen and Dannyl are The Good Guys and genuinely want to help Sonea.

Those 150 pages of her being on the run didn’t give me the thrill they’re supposed to provide. You know she’s going to get caught because we need a story and you know at least some magicians are nice guys and gals. I kept wishing they’d catch her on the next page so we could move on with the story.

The writing style and language don’t drag the story down in my opinion. The only thing that bothered me was the amount of chuckling going on. I know some readers had a problem with the author coming up with new names for existing animals (ceryni for rat, for example) but this didn’t bother me. Ms. Canavan’s explanation is that those animals aren’t exactly the same as the ones we know, but fill a similar role in their ecosystem. The one exception to this seems to be horses, which are simply called horses. In general I like the world creation, especially the Thieves and the way magic and mindreading works. 

This story is set entirely within the city of Imardin, the capital of Kyralia, so the physical/geographical side of world creation is rather limited. The second and third book do expand the world way beyond the city walls. So just like the story is an introduction to the bigger story about the black magician, it’s also only a first glimpse into this world.

The Conclusion

All in all this is a good start for a young adult fantasy trilogy. Just don’t expect it to be JRR Tolkien or even JK Rowling. It is a fun and easy read with a fairly simple plot. The first part could have been shorter which would create space for a stronger plot with a more menacing villain. This book sets up the conflict for the second and third parts of the trilogy which are more interesting.