Just finished reading Robin Hobb's new book "Renegade's Magic", and I'm still chewing over whether or not I actually liked it. This third in a trilogy is about a young man who is the second son of a noble family. His father is something of a dictator and martinet whose only hope for his son is to excel in the military. Early on in his life, Nevare has an encounter with magic, and part of his soul is split from the rest. When he reclaims the missing piece, he thinks he has solved his problems, but when a plague strikes the military school he is in, he finds himself infected. He manages to survive, but unlike other survivors who grow weak and thin, Nevare starts to balloon, despite eating no more than normal.
The doctor at his school sends him home, but his father is disgusted with how his son looks and tries everything in his power to force him to lose weight, with no success. Thinking that his son has been bribing the servants to bring him food, and with another outbreak of the plague affecting the household, his father disowns him and Nevare flees to a town on the border, where his nation is fighting a people they call the "Specks", for their speckled skin. There, he finds that the former piece of his soul has been trained to be a Speck Mage, or "Big Man", who are fat not only with food, but magic. The larger and plumper a big man is, the more status he brings to his clan. Nevare enlists in the army as a footsoldier, and is given the job of burying the dead and being in charge of the graveyard. However, once again plague breaks out, and Nevare comes to realize that the magic is driving him into the Speck lands. Every time he tries to settle down or resist the magic, bad things happen to him and those around him.
In the last book, Nevare's former piece of soul takes over, under the name Soldier's Boy. Soldier's Boy's task is to stop the Gernians from killing the Speck's "ancestor trees", former Big Men and Women whose souls live on in the trees. But because their souls are split, Soldier's Boy has magic but doesn't know what to do with it, and Nevare can see Soldier's Boy's lover and mentor and speak with her, which his Speck-self cannot. Now, no longer in control of his own body, he must sit back and watch as Soldier's Boy starts a war with Nevare's people, a war that can only end badly for both sides.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this particular book. Neither of the two main characters, Soldier's Boy and Nevare, had my sympathy. One was doing horrible things in the name of saving his people, but the other wasn't all that sympathetic, either, seeming to be driven by a great deal of bigotry. At the same time, they should have come together and be whole, and they do manage it... only to have the ending be extremely...strange, in my opinion. What was the point in having to come together, if the ending seems to have invalidated this fact? Is Nevare still missing a piece of his soul? I couldn't tell what the answer was supposed to be, and the entire story feels like some long, strange interlude in the middle of a character's life that in the end, doesn't really amount to much. In that, it wasn't really satisfying for me. I suspect I will continue to think on and chew over the story in my mind until I either come to a conclusion or give up.
The second book I read today was Andre Norton's "Dragon Mage", the follow-up to a book she wrote in the late 60's called "Dragon Magic". In reality, while Andre Norton had plotted the story with her co-writer Jean Rabe, she died before she could actually write any of it, so the entire story is written by Rabe. For someone used to reading Andre Norton books, it doesn't actually read like one of her books, for her style is inimitable. On the other hand, it is a successful story, and involves many of the characters from the original book.
Shilo is the daughter of Sigmund, one of the characters from the first book. Her dad has died, and since her mother (divorced from her father) apparently doesn't want her, she's moved in with her paternal grandmother and grandfather in a little town in Michigan, where they own an antique store. She's not happy there. She misses her father and finds the small town where she lives stultifying, though she doesn't mind the antiques so much because her father was a history scholar and inculcated in her a love of history.
One night when her grandparents go for a fish boil, Shilo stays home and hears a female voice say, "Sigurd Clawhand, I need you." Shilo follows the voice to the attic, where she finds an old wooden puzzle box depicting four dragons. However, it doesn't look like all the pieces are there. Her grandmother finds her and tells her about the puzzle, that Shilo's father and three friends found the puzzle in the house of a world traveller who had died. They put the puzzle together and told stories about the adventures they had with the dragons they had put together, but her grandmother didn't believe any of them. After they put it together, the puzzle disappeared, but later was found in a closet in Sigmund's house. His younger brother had attempted to put the puzzle together, but lost many of the pieces, which enraged her father, but he kept the puzzle.
Shilo takes the puzzle to her room and puts the remaining dragon pieces together, then discovers that some of the pieces from the gold and silver dragon fit together. Unable to stop working on the puzzle, she puts together a picture of a gold and silver dragon, and finds herself swept away to Babylon, where she doesn't know how to leave. She teams up with a priest of Shamash, who helps her flee from a rich man who knows how to speak English and who is very interested in Shilo.
As they flee the man and the city, Shilo encounters the dragon from the picture she made out of the puzzle and finds out that the magic is not in the puzzle, it is in her. The puzzle is merely an aid to concentration. However, before she can return home, she must rescue the Dragon's eggs, which were stolen and are being used in a plot that may destroy not only the Dragon and Babylon, but the entire human race.
The dragon also summons help for her, and to her surprise, one of her helpers is her own father, still a young man, and his friend Kim, another one of the four boys who completed the dragon puzzle long ago. But though the dragon tells her that she has more magic than her father and his friends, is it enough to triumph and prevent the terrible future the dragon has seen?
I've moved on to another Sci Fi/Fantasy book, 1634:The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce. I'm completely unable to write such political intrigue myself without making it sound dull as dishwater, so I enjoy the politics along with the story.
After this, I have one more library book to read before starting on my mountainous "To be Read" pile, "The Last Days of Krypton". Ah well, have at thee, TBR pile!
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