The Magician's Guild, by Trudi Canavan

This was not a good book to read right after finishing Cryptonomicon, which is incredibly well-written. On absolute terms, the writing is sophomoric. The language and the prose are very humble and showcase the fact that this was the author's first novel. There are excellent first novels out there, but this is not one of them. What made me not give up on it was: (1) the fact that I had already bought the two sequels in the trilogy, (2) I wanted to read a "magic-centered" kind of fantasy story, (3) the cover of the British edition is way cool, and finally (4) I wanted so much for the author to succeed.

This book reads like it was written after a role-playing game campaign: a good part of the story happens in underground passages, where characters turn left and right, finding friends and foes, places to hide, and places to flee. You can almost hear the dungeon master asking: "What are you doing next?" It's not all like that, thankfully, but the main the argument is pretty beat up: poor girl living a life of many hardships is discovered to have great magic potential. The book is almost diposable. Almost. I plowed through at great pains and came to the end just when it was getting better: as the girl Sonea starts to learn magic, the writing takes a turn for the better, but then the book just ends and you feel spurred to read the sequel.