Alex James's Blog: AlexJamesNovels Blog - Posts Tagged "trudi-canavan"

The Magician’s Guild is the first book in the Black Magician trilogy. It’s about Sonea, a young girl who feels angry at magicians and how they have made life difficult for the lower-class dwells. She sees other people casting stones at them, only for the stones to bounce back from the magical barrier. She picks up a stone and casts it with the full force of her anger ... and it breaks through, colliding with a magician’s head and sending him to the ground unconscious.

From that moment onward there is a manhunt through slums to find this girl with latent magical ability. I liked the idea of the guild hunting through the twisted and dirty slums to capture somebody. The portrayal of Magicians as elitist, robed, and predominantly male enforcers of society made them appear untouchable and terrifying. I must say that although I was interested in the magicians, I didn’t connect well with Sonea, her friends, or even have much of an interest in the thieves. The storyline was reasonably interesting until about half way through when...

It became incredibly exciting! I really liked the magicians Rothen and Dannyl. Their banter kept the story alive before, but Rothen’s knowledge of the Guild and his mission to make the reader see it as a force for good as much as evil was very interesting, and I became engrossed in the character interaction. Could it have been better? I thought the prose was very careful throughout, perhaps if there were more risky events or happenstances that leaped out then it would have put it a few notches higher in my estimation. Furthermore the truth about the High Lord seemed obvious much earlier to me. However, having said that, the conclusion was a proper conclusion, and the story was consistently well-structured.

Overall, if you like serious stories about magicians, interesting characters, and an exciting plot then I recommend this. Reading the second book is not out of the question for me!