The Innocent Mage review
Jan. 18th, 2011 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI definitely picked up The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller via BookMooch, but I think it was actually a website recommendation, rather than a random selection from a user inventory to make up the numbers.
Anyway, it's a chunky book, but turned out to be a very fast read (640 pages in less than five days is pretty quick for me) and very enjoyable.
To get the quibbles out of the way first:
This book could never claim to be original - country oik leaves home to make his fortune in the city and turns out to be the saviour from a centuries-old prophecy. So far, so standard in terms of usual fantasy fare.
On top of this, there were two stylistic aspects that rather annoyed me. Firstly, the vocabulary and idiom of the narrative reflected the character whose point of view each section was from. Now, this makes sense to me if it's a first person perspective, but not for third person, and I've never been keen on "dialect" writing anyway, so I generally prefer it to be restricted to dialogue, rather than invading the narrative. More irritating was the splitting up of subordinate clauses without making them into full sentences in their own right. I can understand wanting to avoid overly long sentences, but leaving the poor clauses as fragments that don't go anywhere is just bad writing.
However, as I said before, the book was very enjoyable overall, and it was the characters that saved the day. There was lots of intrigue and excitement, lots of well drawn relationships, and depth-laden characterisation, and many likeable people to engage reader interest and emotions. The aspect I liked most was that it was a very personal story, even though it had an overriding "fate of the world hangs in the balance" theme. For the entirety of this instalment, the title character was "innocent" of his destiny, and so was generally taken up with mundane things like making a living. Given the level of doom that started to arrive towards the end of the book, I think the focus of the concluding instalment "The Awakened Mage" will be on a much grander scale, which I think might be rather a shame. Add to that the fact that I like so many of the characters so much, and I'm not entirely sure I want to read the sequel at all.
Ah well, I think I'll read another couple of books in between and then make the decision as to whether or not to persevere.
Anyway, it's a chunky book, but turned out to be a very fast read (640 pages in less than five days is pretty quick for me) and very enjoyable.
To get the quibbles out of the way first:
This book could never claim to be original - country oik leaves home to make his fortune in the city and turns out to be the saviour from a centuries-old prophecy. So far, so standard in terms of usual fantasy fare.
On top of this, there were two stylistic aspects that rather annoyed me. Firstly, the vocabulary and idiom of the narrative reflected the character whose point of view each section was from. Now, this makes sense to me if it's a first person perspective, but not for third person, and I've never been keen on "dialect" writing anyway, so I generally prefer it to be restricted to dialogue, rather than invading the narrative. More irritating was the splitting up of subordinate clauses without making them into full sentences in their own right. I can understand wanting to avoid overly long sentences, but leaving the poor clauses as fragments that don't go anywhere is just bad writing.
However, as I said before, the book was very enjoyable overall, and it was the characters that saved the day. There was lots of intrigue and excitement, lots of well drawn relationships, and depth-laden characterisation, and many likeable people to engage reader interest and emotions. The aspect I liked most was that it was a very personal story, even though it had an overriding "fate of the world hangs in the balance" theme. For the entirety of this instalment, the title character was "innocent" of his destiny, and so was generally taken up with mundane things like making a living. Given the level of doom that started to arrive towards the end of the book, I think the focus of the concluding instalment "The Awakened Mage" will be on a much grander scale, which I think might be rather a shame. Add to that the fact that I like so many of the characters so much, and I'm not entirely sure I want to read the sequel at all.
Ah well, I think I'll read another couple of books in between and then make the decision as to whether or not to persevere.
