Take a photo of a barcode or cover
ambrosia_and_axes 's review for:
Magician's End
by Raymond E. Feist
First I want to start this off by talking about a study that I heard about back when I was in high school. I suggested that when people sit down to watch a TV show over and over, your brain treats the TV show like a good friend. By extension, when the show finishes its run, it feels like a friendship ending. That's how I feel finishing this book.
It would feel unfair to me to have this just be a review of this book. One of the strengths of Raymond E. Feist's writing is how bloody freakin prolific he is. 30 books that all contain at least some of the same characters, take place within the same world (I use that term loosely), and manage to theoretically span some 200(?) or so years.
I, at this point, desperately want them to release some massive multi-issue bound books with whole page pictures and decently sized maps. I want to be able to put the Magician series (as I'm calling said 30 books) on one shelf similar to the way my mother and grandmother had encyclopedias on theirs. The series is expansive in scope and yet simple in story. It reminds me more of Harry Potter than anything else. At first scrap the stories and characters seem simple, but as time goes on and you read more about them their depth becomes apparent. A review of any one book in the selection would be to ignore the greater part of the whole.
That is not to say that as a whole they are without flaws. They exist, and become especially apparent when you sit down to read all 30 in a row (or 29/30 like me). Little things here and there, a character who wasn't present suddenly is, six horses instead of 5, things like that. Things that fail to take away from the entire story.
The other thing that is wonderful about the series is that he isn't afraid to kill the puppy. I don't know if this is an actual saying, but it relates back to the movie Independence Day. In an early screen test of said movie there was a scene in a city where a dog is running around, suddenly the aliens attack, there is a blast crater in the street, and we move on in the story. It's at this point that people's interest in the movie begins to flag, because they can't believe they killed the puppy. A new cut is inserted into the movie, we see the dog scamper around some rubble, and everyone has a grand old time.
Raymond E. Feist will kill the puppy. He'll kill characters, and this book he killed the ones I thought would make it to the end. It was impressive, painful, and very much a better read because of it. I mean on the one hand, yes, the good guys are going to win. It is a traditional style fantasy/sci-fi story after all. On the other hand just because they win doesn't me they shouldn't have to pay a cost to do so. Thus death, destruction, murder, betrayal.
The books are very human, and this one in particular. It was a prime example of what writing can create, and what people should look for in it. Seriously, I wasn't kidding about wanting those big expensive bound versions for my bookshelf.
It would feel unfair to me to have this just be a review of this book. One of the strengths of Raymond E. Feist's writing is how bloody freakin prolific he is. 30 books that all contain at least some of the same characters, take place within the same world (I use that term loosely), and manage to theoretically span some 200(?) or so years.
I, at this point, desperately want them to release some massive multi-issue bound books with whole page pictures and decently sized maps. I want to be able to put the Magician series (as I'm calling said 30 books) on one shelf similar to the way my mother and grandmother had encyclopedias on theirs. The series is expansive in scope and yet simple in story. It reminds me more of Harry Potter than anything else. At first scrap the stories and characters seem simple, but as time goes on and you read more about them their depth becomes apparent. A review of any one book in the selection would be to ignore the greater part of the whole.
That is not to say that as a whole they are without flaws. They exist, and become especially apparent when you sit down to read all 30 in a row (or 29/30 like me). Little things here and there, a character who wasn't present suddenly is, six horses instead of 5, things like that. Things that fail to take away from the entire story.
The other thing that is wonderful about the series is that he isn't afraid to kill the puppy. I don't know if this is an actual saying, but it relates back to the movie Independence Day. In an early screen test of said movie there was a scene in a city where a dog is running around, suddenly the aliens attack, there is a blast crater in the street, and we move on in the story. It's at this point that people's interest in the movie begins to flag, because they can't believe they killed the puppy. A new cut is inserted into the movie, we see the dog scamper around some rubble, and everyone has a grand old time.
Raymond E. Feist will kill the puppy. He'll kill characters, and this book he killed the ones I thought would make it to the end. It was impressive, painful, and very much a better read because of it. I mean on the one hand, yes, the good guys are going to win. It is a traditional style fantasy/sci-fi story after all. On the other hand just because they win doesn't me they shouldn't have to pay a cost to do so. Thus death, destruction, murder, betrayal.
The books are very human, and this one in particular. It was a prime example of what writing can create, and what people should look for in it. Seriously, I wasn't kidding about wanting those big expensive bound versions for my bookshelf.