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A review by beardybot
Successor's Promise by Trudi Canavan
2.0
He's a boy, she's a girl, and they're the two most powerful magicians in the known worlds. They're caught between two factions: The Rebels, who are trying to return an even more powerful magician to life to save the worlds in chaos since he died; and The Restorers, who are trying to thwart them and bring order to the worlds that were in chaos under his rule. They're babysitting his unwitting vessel, and wondering how much they can trust each other. So far, so good.
But. Mind-reading is a crutch for the characters, and a crutch for the author. Much of the book is spent inside someone's head, and their time is so often spent in someone else's. We're talking hundreds of pages of exposition where characters are vacillating between conveniently learning of a thing that will push the story along, and puzzling out (more preteen than Sherlock) what it might mean when they can't. There were times I put the book down in sheer frustration at the frequency of this arbitrary "conflict." He couldn't read her mind, or she couldn't read his, or it would be socially unacceptable to read theirs, and this guy had blocked his memories! Oh no! What a dilemma to have to deal with the same constraints as everyone else ever.
Successor's Promise is at least very easy to read. This is in its favour, and I could read 100 pages of this in the same time as I could read 20 in books I'm really enjoying. But, compared to the first two, the characters are weaker, the worlds even moreso, the story light on the ground, and the prose... serviceable.
I am not sure I'll read the next book. I might even recommend that you stop with number two, unless you've recently read some guff that a light read might nicely balance. I suspect if I hadn't read this after a string of fantastic books, I wouldn't be so harsh.
But. Mind-reading is a crutch for the characters, and a crutch for the author. Much of the book is spent inside someone's head, and their time is so often spent in someone else's. We're talking hundreds of pages of exposition where characters are vacillating between conveniently learning of a thing that will push the story along, and puzzling out (more preteen than Sherlock) what it might mean when they can't. There were times I put the book down in sheer frustration at the frequency of this arbitrary "conflict." He couldn't read her mind, or she couldn't read his, or it would be socially unacceptable to read theirs, and this guy had blocked his memories! Oh no! What a dilemma to have to deal with the same constraints as everyone else ever.
Successor's Promise is at least very easy to read. This is in its favour, and I could read 100 pages of this in the same time as I could read 20 in books I'm really enjoying. But, compared to the first two, the characters are weaker, the worlds even moreso, the story light on the ground, and the prose... serviceable.
I am not sure I'll read the next book. I might even recommend that you stop with number two, unless you've recently read some guff that a light read might nicely balance. I suspect if I hadn't read this after a string of fantastic books, I wouldn't be so harsh.