Thief's Magic

I've been looking forward to this new series from Trudi Canavan because I really enjoyed her excellent Black Magician trilogy. However, I was somewhat disappointed that it is a fairly long book (560 pages) where not too much happens.

The book is comprised of two stories, that of Tyen, a young magic and archaeology student and Rielle, daughter of a wealthy family who own a large dyeworks. They live in different countries but have the common problem that the world supply of magic is running out. In Tyen's country, magic is used as the energy to power machines and advancing technology is rapidly depletuing supplies. In Rielle's country, magic is conserved by only allowing priests to use it. Ordinary people caught using magic are labelled tainted, put in chaons and taken away to a secret location by the priests. I had expected that these tow story threads would link up at some stage but that did not happen in this volume.

The book started well with a 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' type scene where Tyen, his classmates and tutor, looking for treasures in newly discovered tombs have to flee when chased by angry locals. However, this turns out to just be a device for Tyen to discover and use a very special magic book. This ultimately leads to him running away from the Academy where he is a student and the rest of the book is about his (fairly boring) journey to get to a country where he can be free to learn and practice magic.

Rielle's story is also fairly drawn out. She has fallen in love with an artist, a lower class of man than her family will allow her to marry. She knows her ability to detect when magic has been used must be kept a secret but she ultimately lets down her guard when she is with him and is captured by the priests and taken away.

Whether these two will meet up in the future we don't know but my guess is that this first instalment in the series is setting the scene for what is to come and hopefully the next volume will be better paced and more engrossing. Despite it being a long book and centred on these two characters I didn't feel there was a lot of character development so that they are still very flat and I don't feel any emotional investment in them at this stage.

The final section of the book did finally provide a bit more action and interest, propelling Tyen and Rielle into new places with the promise of more adventures in the next book.