The Magician's Guild - Trudi Canavan

Okay, finished reading Trudi Canvan's The Magician's Guild this evening, and have kinda come out with mixed feelings about what I thought. I quite enjoyed it, but I'm not really sure that that can be counted as a review in itself.

So, what happens? Sonea is a 'dwell' (lower classes, when the city is cleared each year they're evicted), when the Magicians are carrying out the clearance one year she throws a stone at the Magicians, and to everyones surprise it breaks their shield and injures a Magician, thus begins a hunt by the guild to find Sonea.

And that's really where my mixed feelings about the book come in, I enjoyed reading it, it was quite interesting and I quite liked Canavan's writing style but you can only read 'they ran away and hid somewhere else' (I'll admit that I'm paraphrasing) before it becomes a bit repetative. To my mind the running away and hiding was dragged out far longer than it needed to be, it could have been done in half the time and then moved onto the next bit of the plot.

This was obviously written with the idea for the full trilogy in mind because it throws up many unanswered questions that presumably will be answered in the next two books. For instance creepy old men hiding in the slums from the Magician's Guild, and what to my mind seemed like undisclosed pasts for half of the characters that obviously need to be discovered throughout the course of the next two books.

One thing that I did find slightly off putting was Canavan's a slight habit of referring about the history between characters as though I should already know about it, as though I'd missed a book out that I should have read first.

As often seems to be the case, I found that I wasn't as interested in Sonea as I was the characters around her. Two Magicians, Dannyl and Rothen, I liked and look forward to reading more about, and a thief from within the slums called Feran. And of course we have a touch of youthful romance to be exanded upon in the next two books and someone who is not what they seem who will have to be exposed throughout the trilogy.

I enjoyed this and I will at some point track down the next two to see what happens and how it ends, but I won't be rushing out to buy them. Having said that I have sinced tracked down a couple of other books by the same author to see what her other trilogies are like. The Magician's Guild was, I think, written for children, so I'm intrigued to see how her writing changes, if at all, for an older audience.