The Novice, by Trudi Canavan

This book was much more enjoyable than the first one in the trilogy, The Magician's Guild. The story finally started to take shape and it left the underground tunnels that gave the first book a cheap RPG feel.

Although it may be an unfair comparison, the book seems to follow the well-established Harry Potter dynamics (or dare I say, formula?). The protagonist is a magician novice, in a larger-than-life school, in a universe of different magical disciplines, facing bullies lead by an arch-enemy that feels a lot like what's-his-face from Slitherin. It's not a whole lot less fun, but it doesn't smell very original.

All in all, there are many more qualities to this book than to the first in the trilogy. I've been actually scratching my head and wondering if the series was inflated by an entire additional volume just because fantasy series are most often trilogies... nuff speculation.

Even though I rate this book as an empty fun read, it was fun nonetheless. There's quite a bit of social critique in the discussion of how elitist the Magician's Guild is. There is also a seemingly gratuitous discussion of gender issues. Perhaps the concluding book explains how that discussion is relevant to the story; there is no denying, however, that in the context of this book alone, it feels like the author has taken the opportunity to climb on a soapbox.

Ok, so what is the spiel? Sonea, a poor slum dweller, discovers by accident that she has powerful magical talent. In the first book, the Magician's Guild, an organization that holds a tight monopoly on the training and use of magical talent, seeks her out and offers her entrance in their school. This second volume talks of her evolution as a magician novice, but more importantly, of her discovery that the head of Guild is a user of a forbidden form of magic, black magic.

As I said before, this volume reads much better than the first and is fairly enjoyable (no random acts of extreme violence as in Terry Goodkind's opus). Character development is decent enough to make you start caring for them. The one annoying matter of style is the author rubbing on the readers' faces all the "questions" that go through a character's mind. The author seems prone to frequently throw the reader's way several questions in a row in order to outline a character's thought process: "Would she really consider leaving the Guild? Well, she didn't want to join them in the first place. Then again, what will she do if she leaves? Will she simply accept to have her magical powers taken away? etc, etc, etc" I believe that the author overuses this technique, which at times is almost Hollywoodian in that it leaves nothing for the reader's intelligence to work out.

These gripes aside, though, I actually enjoyed this one enough to continue reading the series. Now, on to The High Lord.