Must-Read Monday - The Black Magician Trilogy
- A Book-Bound Girl
- Aug 20, 2018
- 3 min read
I love reading book reviews. I love seeing if the new series by an author I love is like their previous work or totally different. I am forever grateful that if I'm unsure whether I fancy something based on the blurb, I can hop online and someone else will give me a little more detail on the plot. But I also love hearing what people's all time favourite series are.
What's the one series you will always recommend, no matter how much time has passed?
What books do you turn to when you need the comfort of a familiar world?
What book do you wish you could read for the first time all over again, because it was so indescribably amazing?
In these posts, I'm going to take you through some of mine. Some of my absolute must-read recommendations. The books I return to again and again, because I'm not ready to leave their world behind.
This week, it's The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan. The High Lord (the final book in the trilogy) is possibly the first book which left me physically sobbing over a fictional character.
There is a sequel trilogy, which is also great, but I was absolutely terrified that they wouldn't live up to my expectations, or that I wouldn't like how the story progressed - in writing this post, I've learnt that she's planning to write another sequel trilogy, so I'm simultaneously overjoyed and terrified all over again.
I don't think I can accurately put into words how attached I am to every single main character in this series; my dad and I once had a half hour debate about how to pronounce 'Cery' - not helped by the fact that Trudi is very relaxed about how people pronounce the character/place/species names in her books, so we couldn't find a definitive answer!
The first book is a little slow to start with, but stick with it! I was actually 14 or so when I first found the books, and I stopped reading The Magicians' Guild halfway through, only to return to it a year or so later when I bought The Novice and The High Lord in hardback and devoured them on holiday - cue returning home and desperately searching for my original hardback of the first book, eventually giving up and buying a paperback, to find my hardback two days later behind the Hogwarts trunk which took pride of place in 15 year old Kyra's bedroom: typical.
The world building, character development, and plot of these books is fantastic; something which is consistent across Trudi's books - I have yet to read anything of hers I didn't love.
The Magicians' Guild Synopsis
"We should expect this young woman to be more powerful than our average novice, possibly even more powerful than the average magician." This year, like every other, the magicians of Imardin gather to purge the city of undesirables. Cloaked in the protection of their sorcery, they move with no fear of the vagrants and miscreants who despise them and their work-—until one enraged girl, barely more than a child, hurls a stone at the hated invaders...and effortlessly penetrates their magical shield. What the Magicians' Guild has long dreaded has finally come to pass. There is someone outside their ranks who possesses a raw power beyond imagining, an untrained mage who must be found and schooled before she destroys herself and her city with a force she cannot yet control.
If you like Epic Fantasy; a headstrong, moral, and highly opinionated female lead; tales of undiscovered magic; insurmountable foes; unlikely love; and incredibly realistic worlds, then you will love these books. One of my absolute favourite things about all Trudi's work, but TBM trilogy particularly, is the way she blends different perspectives so seamlessly to create a fully rounded picture of what is happening throughout the world, and the individual roles the main characters play within it
These books are fantasy without the excessively detailed descriptions and complicated laws which sometimes make the genre hard to get into.
They are, quite simply, extraordinary.
If you haven't fallen in love with Sonea's world yet, I highly recommend you pay it a visit. You won't regret it.
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