Magician: Apprentice

I read this book for my book club, which always prides itself on choosing SFF books from a wide range of publication dates. This month, we went back to some 80s high fantasy, and it was ... fine. In the book club, people were taking about how books are all essentially “dated” because they are written for the audience of that time, and I definitely see the point. Magician is pretty well written, but also not written for me. It's male-centric and euro-centric, the protagonist is an orphan boy with a great power he doesn't understand, it liberally uses Tolkien-esque conceptions of elves and dwarves and has evil foreigners who show up and must be kept out. The few women in the story are all extremely beautiful (even when the put on PANTS!) and exist mostly for decor. It gets compared a lot to the Belgariad, but the Belgariad had much cooler female characters.

It's also only half a book. In the US, apparently they chopped one book into two to make publication easier (Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master), but the chopping point is abrupt and apparently arbitrary. I know it feels like half a book because it is half a book, but honestly a better ending was about a hundred pages earlier when the protagonist essentially disappears from the story. Not a good move, US publishing.

That said, it is well-written and has some unique things about it (parallel dimensions in high fantasy!), but overall, I'm kind of glad it was chopped into 2 books because I don't feel obligated to read the second one. It gets a “fine” on my list.