Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist

 Lately I've been reading through Pierce Brown's Red Rising series (which is fantastic by the way) but those books are pretty heavy emotionally so I've been trying to space them out with months in between to decompress. The good thing about this on/off cycle is that it's been pushing me to get deeper into my TBR list than I usually do.....which brought us to Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist. 

The first thing to note is a publication and edition issue: This edition is an expanded Author's Preferred Text. From the forward, we find out that the "First Two Books" in this series were originally published as a single volume that was cut down to size and released as MAGICIAN sans subtitle. Ten years later, Feist recieved permission to rework some or most of the deletions back into the book, split it into two, and then republished the book(s) in two volumes MAGICIAN: APPRENTICE and MAGICIAN:MASTER. 

The reason for this note is that I've never read the unified original edition, so I can't speak to how that might affect the story or character development. My opinions are solely drawn from the Author's Preferred Text edition so I have no idea what is coming next or where the story is going.

That being said, my favorite thing about this book was the number of times I was surprised by the paths that the story took. We begin our tale in a standard High Fantasy local of a young orphan boy stumbling in the midst of a storm into the house of a powerful magician. First plot beat achieved. Young boy winds up being selected as the magician's apprentice. Second plot beat achieved. We meet a young princess who winds up being rather fond of our dear apprentice. Third plot beat achieved. So far....standard. Predictable. One might even say comforting. And then stuff starts really picking up. This book that starts out as a traditional and predictable High Fantasy story then starts getting sprinkled in with some Sci-Fi interdimensional weirdness that culminate in a full-blown invasion from another world! 

A part of me was kicking myself because of the literal series title on the front cover: The Riftwar Saga. What kind of a rift? A magical rift? A sociological rift? Nope. A straight-up dimensional rift. 

Feist uses the different worlds to create very interesting differences between the different groups, which I found fascinating. Our invaders have almost no metal on their planet, and no horses either, so they have lacquered armour and weapons instead and utilize a fast-moving semi-insectiod species as a kind of cavalry instead. 

The other interesting aspect of the book that surprised me was the rotating point-of-view characters. We start by following our dear magician's apprentice, Pug. Then, later, we meet Pug's friend and almost adopted brother Tomas who is training as a soldier. Tomas becomes our second point of view character. We have occasional bounces to other characters here and there, but most of the book are from these two boys perspectives. Towards the end of the book though, we rotate again and both of our main protagonists disappear and we return to a now besieged hometown for both Pug and Tomas to watch it's defense from those who remained as the boys went off on their adventures. Needless to say, as a literally split book, we have scores of cliffhangers on our hands. All of the major characters a mid-air at the conclusion of MAGICIAN:APPRENTICE, and I am very much interested to see where they will go next. I can definitely see how this book, which was the author's debut, led to almost thirty total books and is reported to be currently under development to be a new streaming series. I'm not sure yet if I'll read all of the books in the entire saga, but at this point I am definitely invested enough for the original trilogy (now a tetralogy with the split first book as mentioned above). Definitely a fun and engaging story for fans of the genre. PS, the entire sequence with the golden dragon made me cry. IYKYK.