Tough Traveling: City of Wizards

The Thursday feature "Tough Traveling" is the brainchild of Nathan of Review Barn, who has come up with the excellent idea of making a new list each week based on the most common tropes in fantasy, as seen in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynn Jones. Nathan has invited anyone who is interested to come play along, so be sure to check out the first link for more information. Compulsive list-maker that I am, I'm very excited to take part!

This week's tour topic is: City of Wizards
 
Something tells me this should be one of the easier themes for this feature, but I still had a tough time of it, especially coming up with only books I have read. After combing my shelves, here are my five I came up with:

The Black Prism by Brent Weeks - The Chromeria

Based on chromaturgy, the magic system in this series is one of the more interesting and unique ones I've come across in fantasy. In this world, the "wizards" or magic users can draft a substance called luxin which takes on different physical properties depending on their color in the light spectrum. The heart of the government is located at the Chromeria, also the seat of education and regulation for all color magic.

When the character Kip first visits the Chromeria in order to be trained as a drafter, he is amazed with the huge, impressive colorful structures made of luxin. I'll be honest -- to me this city was a bit hard to visualize. I kept thinking of those multicolored plastic hamsters cages, you know the ones with all those tubes you can add to it to make it a nice rodent funhouse? Yeah, I pictured a whole city like that.

The Magician's Guild by Trudi Canavan - Imardin

Imardin is the capital of Kyralia, home of the Magician's Guild, and as such that is where all magicians go to learn magic and also where most Kyralian magicians live. According to the wiki, because Kyralian blood is so high with magical potency compared to other countries, Kyralia also has a tendency to produce more magicians! Oh how I love learning interesting new things about my books. This Tough Traveling feature rocks.

They're real asshats in Imardin, though. Each winter, the capital gives the boot to all its "undesirables" like the poor and the homeless. In an attempt to protest this Purge, a young vagrant named Sonea somehow manages to pierce the magician's shield and bean one of them on the head, kicking off the chaotic events of this novel.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling - Hogsmeade

Okay, I realize calling the quaint little village of Hogsmeade a "city" is a bit of a stretch. I know that. But I just can't not include this one, if you think about it. I mean, considering how places like Diagon Alley or Godric's Hollow that are really just pockets of the magical community hidden inside established Muggle settlements, Hogsmeade's pretty much the only place they have to themselves and all to themselves. The only all-wizarding community in Britain!

While Hogsmeade was actually first mentioned in the first book, it doesn't have its first appearance until this one.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson - Elantris

Elantris, capital of Arelon, was once known as the "City of the Gods", where anyone who was "chosen" went to live. Ordinary people touched and transformed by the power of the Shaod go through physical and mental changes that give them special abilities. The city was literally radiant, a place of power where the Elantrians used their magical abilities for the benefit of all.

Lovely place, really, until all of a sudden the magic failed and everyone there lost their powers, leaving Elantris a contaminated prison city. The magic users became powerless, wretched creatures, and the city itself crumbled into oblivion.

Jaina Proudmoore: Tides of War by Christie Golden - Dalaran

I'm totally cheesing it a bit here by including this one, but what can I say, I'm a gamer at heart. When I heard that "City of Wizards" was this week's theme, my mind immediately went to World of Waracraft's renowned city of mages: Dalaran.

Dalaran is a "magocratic" city-state with a turbulent history. Destroyed in the Third War, the mages of the city refused to abandon their home and instead erected a huge glowing force field-like dome around the ruins in order to rebuild. After that, they moved the whole damn city by floating it to another continent by magical means. Now that's dedication! Dalaran plays a pretty big role in this novel, which is why I chose it.

Book Review: The Magician's Apprentice by Trudi Canavan

The Magician's Apprentice by Trudi Canavan

Genre: Fantasy, Magic

Series: The Black Magician Trilogy

Publisher: Orbit

Publication Date: February 2009

Wendy's Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

The Magician's Apprentice is considered #0.5 in Trudi Canavan's The Black Magician Trilogy. It was written after, but serves as a set up for The Magicians' Guild, which I have not read. It mainly follows the story of Tessia, a young healer apprenticed to her father, who discovers her magical abilities when she deflects the advances of a Sachakan mage. She becomes apprenticed to Lord Dakon, joining his apprentice Jayan, who initially disdains the fact that he must share his education with a woman.

There are two other characters who occasionally get to tell their story, namely Stara, a Sachakan noble daughter who is forced into an unwanted marriage in order to produce an heir for her father, and Hanara, the slave of the Sachakan mage who tried to take Tessia. While I appreciated the effort to reveal the other sides of the story, these characters weren't particularly strong enough in their telling. I'm not sure where Hanara's story is supposed to lead, though Stara is obviously meant to connect this prequel to Canavan's other series, The Traitor's Spy.

The use of magic is one of the most interesting aspects of this book. Through Tessia's training, we get a peek into the process of how magic works in Canavan's world. I was surprised by the idea of magical wars entirely fought by mages. Unfortunately, when the battles are fought in the story, they are very anti-climactic. In fact, I had to reread several of them, believing I must have missed something because they were so brief. Something happens, mages on one side or the other die, but despite all the descriptions that go into Tessia's training, we get no insight on the battle magic. Then certain magical items and practices - that I assume have significance in the future books - are introduced like deus ex machina.

As the war with the Sachakans rages on, things really started to unravel for me. Characters suddenly seemed to be forced into certain roles with no previous indication of why that would be so. Along with the magical elements, several guilds and factions are mentioned, and several relationships are forced awkwardly into place. All of this comes piling in toward the end in a jumble that made me feel like I should have read the other books in order to at least appreciate the significance of these things within the greater picture. I didn't need to read the other books to understand what they were or understand what was going on in this book, but things might have held more meaning, rather than feeling like a sudden rush of elements meant to connect the past to the present.

I'm sure the rest of the series is quite interesting and I did appreciate the glimpse I got of it here, but I sense that this backstory would have better served as a wiki entry instead.

Book Review: The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan

Trudi Canavan is an author I'd been looking forward to read for a long time, which is why she's pretty high on my list for the WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge. Thanks to my book hoarding habits, I found that I actually own the first books from both her Black Magician Trilogy and the Traitor Spy Trilogy and didn't know which to tackle first. Then I found out that the latter series is a continuing story of some of the characters in the former, which ultimately decided it for me. I always I prefer to read things chronologically and in publishing order, so The Magicians' Guild it is!

The book centers around the life of Sonea, a young vagrant girl caught up in the disturbance which occurs every year during the Purge, an event which expels all the city's poor, homeless, beggars and other undesirables from within its boundaries. Sonea sees a group of children trying to annoy the guild magicians in charge by throwing stones at their magical shield, and decides for fun to join in. In a moment of anger, however, the stone she throws somehow manages to pierce the magicians' protection, beaning one of them on the side of the head. Then everything explodes into chaos.

The Magicians' Guild immediately launches a manhunt for the little girl who so effortlessly foiled their shield spell, because it must mean she possesses magical ability as well. No untrained magic user can be trusted to roam unchecked around the city, for the results of that uncontrolled power can be dangerous for all. Not knowing this, Sonea flees and goes deeper underground with the help of her friends, but a time will soon come when she won't be able to escape anymore, neither from the magicians nor herself.

At first, I wasn't sure if I was going to like this. I spent a good chunk of the book wondering when the story will get to the part where the Magician's Guild and Sonea meet up with each other, so that they can finally get on to training her properly in the ways of magic. That's how these kinds of stories usually go, right? Then I realized that the hunt for her was actually the whole point for the entire first half of the novel, dashing any preexisting expectations I had for the plot.

Going to be honest here, the book still didn't quite hook me until the Magicians do eventually end up finding Sonea, and that was around the halfway mark. Everything that occurred before this point detailing the search and Sonea's struggle to control her magic felt like this huge, unnecessarily drawn out introduction, but the good new is, I started to enjoy myself a lot more. It's almost like, "Okay, now that all that's out of the way, we can finally get this show on the road." The conflicts in the plot started to get more interesting, and I found myself drawn to characters like Rothen, for whom I previously felt nothing.

It also wasn't until I finished this book that I heard this series had been re-marketed for the young adult market. If so, that actually made a lot of sense. Assuming that a YA audience probably wouldn't be as critical as I'm being, I thought the story and characters were strong but could have done with a little more depth, especially since a few sections of the plot felt thin to me and not very convincing. As general fantasy though, I liked this book well enough and I think it can be appreciated by all.

Final verdict:

 3.5 of 5 stars