The Magician's Apprentice

*****

5 Stars/5

The Magician’s Apprentice is about Tessia, the local healer’s daughter, who unknowingly uses magic after fending of the advances of a visiting Sachakan mage, she becomes an apprentice to the magician Lord Dakon alongside fellow apprentice Jayan. However she would soon learn that with her magical gifts comes with responsibilities and not all is peaceful as it seems between Sachakan and Kyralia.

This prequel, set a few centuries before the black magician trilogy, has the features that Trudi Canavan is good at - action, romance, humour and lots of magic. It is really interesting to see how the events of this book affected this world centuries down the line in the black magician’s and the traitor spy trilogies, I especially like finding out how the traitors began and how the war affected relations between the nations for years to come.

The characters in this book are all really realistic and you can understand everyone’s motives, while each character is still very different from the people in Canavan’s other series. However while I really liked Tessia, Jayan and Dakon perspectives, I could not get into Hanara’s or Stara’s however it was interesting to hear the story from the other sides view point.

I also like how Canavan did not romanticise what war is like and the hardships of it and how even the “good guys” can justify doing bad things as a means to an end and everyone believes they are they doing what they think is right.

This is a brilliant prequel and would recommend this book to anyone likes Trudi Canavan’s work especially her Black Magician trilogy.