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| Magician: Apprentice (Riftwar Saga) | 
 enlarge | Author: Raymond Feist
Publisher: Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $0.19
You Save: $7.80 (98%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (328 reviews)
Sales Rank: 36285
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0553564943
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553564945
ASIN: 0553564943
Publication Date: January 1, 1994
Release Date: December 1, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. But though his courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely Princess, he was ill at ease with the normal ways of wizardry. Yet Pug's strange sort of magic would one day change forever the fates of two worlds. For dark beings from another world had opened a rift in the fabric of spacetime to being again the age-old battle between the forces of Order and Chaos.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 323 more reviews...
 Sensitively and Intelligently written August 11, 2008
This is not your typical fantasy series beginning. The major theme is quite unique in that magicians can open rifts between worlds. And this is where this story starts, with a rift opening and an invading army coming through.
About the Magic:
I tend to shy away from books that focus too much on magic. I find a tendency to use magic spells as a way to get out of plot difficulties - Absolutely not true in this book! The magic is subdued, subtle, and makes sense. Perfetly handled.
Reverence for dwarves and eleves:
This book was written before the Lord of the Rings movies made dwarves and elves household names and it takes a wondrous and reverant look at these unique creatures. The sense of awe and wonder for these creatures is palpable and you catch it.
Overall simply a five star book. You are going to get attached to the characters and the story - thank goodness the continuing books are already written so you don't have to wait!
About this first book: It is really not a stand-alone work. It is half of the original novel that Feist wrote so if you get this book you should get Magician: Master (Riftwar Saga) too or you are going to be left hanging!
 Beware an author become successful enough to shun editors July 31, 2008
After having read the "author's preferred edition" Magician:Apprentice, I feel as though I were the victim of some cruel prank. Where is the unparalleled work of literary puissance that so many other reviewers seem to have read? It certainly was not to be found among these pages.
Could the "author's preferred edition" be some tragic mis-step on Feist's part, mangling beyond recognition what was once a perfectly readable story? That seems possible, as many of the reviewers here allude to having read it decades ago. I wish I understood the disparity, because like so many of them, I too grew up reading magnificent works of fantasy and science fiction. This book was not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as any of them.
-Character development is forced, trite, and unbelievable. Much time is spent describing thoughts and conversations that are unconvincing, irrelevant, and which simply don't ring true to human experience.
-The narrative manages to be both tedious and omissive, alternating between agonizingly dull narrations of trivial events and years of skipped but seemingly relevant history. It seems reasonable to infer from this that the tedious filler represents that which Feist's editors successfully cut the first time around. Would that they had been as successful later.
-Magician:Apprentice is neither about magic nor an apprenticeship. The fault may be as simple as the book's title, but as others have pointed out, this is not a book for one interested in the travails and accomplishments of a budding wielder of magic. A few tantalizing hints are dropped about the protagonist's mystical potential, but then promptly ignored for the remainder of the book.
-Finally, there is at least one scale on which Feist can never be compared favorably to Tolkien, and that's the development of realistic constructed languages. Almost every proper noun in Magician:Apprentice seems to have been pulled from a random syllable generator. (Crydee? Midkemia? LaMut?) Perhaps it's unfair to expect the linguistic mastery of Tolkien, but Feist's awkward names are jarring enough to break the fiction and reflect the haphazard manner of the overall storycraft.
In short, stay far away from the author's preferred (two-volume) edition. This was a book that cried out for serious editing. If you're determined to read the initial volume of the Riftwar saga (and I wouldn't blame you, based on the average review), at least seek out the original edition, titled simply, "Magician." It can't be worse than the one I read, and may in fact resemble the work of literary excellence most of the other reviewers seem to have read.
 Magician: Apprentice! June 22, 2008
Great book and needed it for son's lang/lit class! Found it quickly and was sent out quickly!
 Very catchy story, worth to read, June 2, 2008
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Very catchy story, worth to read, 4 Nov 2007
I liked the story as it changes through the book, taking interesting turns and introducing new characters and stories. It is worth reading if you like fantasy books.
I can describe this fantasy book as a typical middle earth story merged with some alien invasion and a touch of magic by magicians.
The reason I did not give five stars is that there are quite some things that are explained about how the magic works, and never or very little used later on, so didn't quite understand why they were mentioned. Maybe in the second or third book it will make sense.
A Wonderful Book!! May 30, 2008
I just finished Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master. I must say, they really were fantastic novels. The books were well written, filled with quite a few likable characters and, with one exception, very accessible. The exception was that, for unknown reasons, the first few pages of Magician: Apprentice were kind of tough to read. After that, however, it was clear that I had real "page turners" on my hands.
Overall, these were some of the best books I've read in a long while.
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