The Magician's Guild - Trudi Canavan
While I'm not in a real 'reading slump' anymore, I'm definitely still feeling like I'm not properly enjoying a lot of what I'm reading. I can't remember the last time I read a book that I really, truly loved. With that in mind I decided to pick up a book that I remembered loving when I was younger, in the hopes that some nostalgic fun would rekindle something.
As I haven't read the sequel series to Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy (or the prequel novel) I had a vague idea that it might be fun to read them all. Unfortunately on re-reading this first book in the series I found that I simply didn't enjoy it, and I'm now questioning whether I ever actually liked these books in the first place or whether I've conflated them with Karen Miller's Kingmaker, Kingbreaker books in my memory. I spent the first third of the novel wondering whether I'd ever actually read this book, as I didn't remember any of it, and it wasn't until Sonea sees the strange black-cloaked magician doing weird blood magic stuff that it started to feel familiar again.
The main problem I have with this book is simply that there's not a lot going on in it, which is not ideal when the book is nearly 500 pages long. And for a book about a novice magician who is only just discovering her magic and learning to use it, there's a distinct lack of magic. We see the vast majority of the events from Sonea's perspective and yet, for some reason, we never actually see he learning to control and use her magic despite being told that she's being taught this. It all happens off-page, when this is presumably the most important thing that's ever happened to this character.
In general I just couldn't find much to care about here, and the only reason I didn't DNF it was because I've DNFd a lot of books recently and didn't want to add another to the list and risk slipping into another slump. I remembered enjoying this when I was a teenager and I kept waiting for it to get good, but it never did.
I think it really suffers from being the first novel in a series that's been planned as a series. This is functionally a 500 page prologue, and it's more concerned with setting up the world and events for the next two books than it is with being compelling in its own right. Unfortunately this didn't land for me, and I won't be continuing with the series.