Written by Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice is a fantasy novel that presents a familiar universe, built on genre tropes, with a story with wasted potential, suffering from some shallow worldbuilding and a highly problematic climax. The book follows a young orphan named Pug and his best friend, Tomas, who see their lives drastically change the moment they come across …
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Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence? The story …
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The Sword of Shannara, a fantasy novel written by Terry Brooks, tells a classic, derivative story that is marred by repetition and an unwillingness to detach itself from its greatest inspiration: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The protagonist is Shea, a half-elf who one day receives a visit from a mysterious Druid, called Allanon, who …
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The first book in The Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, is an epic fantasy novel that wears its inspirations on its sleeve – even to a fault: its story is clearly based on Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s Tolkien who most shackles Robert Jordan’s novel. The Eye of the World shines …
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One of the most recurrent problems in fantasy novels concerns exposition, with the intricate world created for the story being described in too much detail, to the detriment of the characters and pacing. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true: the world is put aside for too long and so fails to capture our interest. In Gardens of the Moon, one …
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A Game of Thrones, the first volume of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, presents a vast and intricate world, with a rich array of fascinating locales and characters, and focuses on how their troubled relationships help deconstruct the concept of honor. The plot follows Eddard Stark, the lord of Winterfell in the north of Westeros, who receives news …
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