Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

Rennthyl is the second son of a wool factor, but although his father wants him to be a factor also, he wants to be an artist, a portraitist, and eventually, he becomes an apprentice and Journeyman to a Portraitist named Caliostrus. He enjoys the work, but finds Caliostrus's son Ostrius a thorn in his side.

Rhenn's first portrait commission is to paint a young girl and her cat, comissioned by her father. While he is painting her, he makes a mistake in painting her jawline, and wishes he didn't have to scrape it away and repaint. When he looks again, the paint has somehow become the way he wished it to be, and he isn't sure if he misremembered or not. He goes back to his painting, and decides not to mention it.

But it happens again on other paintings, and even as he becomes a fairly in-demand portraitist, he wonders how he can do these things. He knows there are people who have the power to create things, called Imagers, and everyone is afraid of them, as they can supposedly make both life and death, but his powers aren't anything grand, so he ignores them as best he can, even when his wish for a light in the depths of a nightmare somehow causes the lamp on his table to light.

But then, one day, after the youngest apprentice has run off and he is relegated to doing apprentice tasks by Ostrius, he wishes, for a brief moment that the paraffin in the studio where his master and his son are working to catch afire, and before he knows it, the entire house is on fire. He manages to save the Master's wife, but not his master and not Ostrius, who are killed in the fire. He is chilled by the thought that he had something to do with his master's death.

With nowhere else to go, he temporarily moves back home, where his father gets after him to become a factor once again. But he doesn't want to be a factor, and goes to all the other portrait masters in town to try to join their studios. But none of them seem to want him, and one of them makes it clear that they are afraid of his talent. No master wants to take on a man who will outstrip him in talent, and Rhenn is so good that if he becomes a master, some of them will go out of business. Rhenn doesn't like hearing this, but he has no other choice, so he walks over the Bridge of Hopes and goes to the school of Imagery. He hopes they will take him on, with his small talent.

But take him they do, and they make it clear that his talent isn't small at all. He can already do more than many imagers, and he is accepted at once. He sends messages to his family and starts over again as an Imager Primus, a basic apprentice level. It's not because of his talent that he starts so low, but because he needs to learn things about imaging and himself. He's assigned a mentor in an Imager Master named DiChartyn, and begins working his way up, slowly learning about what it means to be an imager and the laws that he must know because they cover the school, imaging and what he may or may not do.

Soon, he is made an Imager Secundus, and that brings trouble. Some of the older Imagers believe that Rhenn is a spy for the Imager masters, and two of the Secundi decide to take him out, Johanyr and Diazyr. Rhenn tries to defuse them with words, but they won't stand down: they intend to severely hurt or kill him. Rhenn allows them to batter his shields, but when it becomes clear that they intend him fatal harm, he images caustic soda into their eyes and chests. Diazyr is killed, and Johanyr lives, but is nearly blinded permanently.

This brings him trouble, because while they were bullies, Johanyr is the son of what passes for nobility, the High Families, and Diazyr was a gang leader in his old life. When Rhenn is allowed to go out into the town (training Imagers are too vulnerable, and too deadly to be allowed out among normal people), he meets a girl named Seliora, who he first met when he was a portraitist and liked. He asks her to meet him for dinner, and at the dinner, she tells him there is a msn following him and looking at him. He dismisses it, but when he goes out of the restaurant to go back home, the man shoots him before he can raise his shields. Rhenn images caustic into the shooter, which kills him, but he nearly dies himself before he can get treated, and he is long recovering.

The incident causes him and Seliora to grow closer, for she helped get him back to the school on Imagisle, but he can hardly believe that someone wanted to kill him. But while his mentor trains him for a job in the government, he also wants Rhenn to become an anti-imager spy, seeking out and neutralizing those who would kill or destroy Imagers. To do this, he uses Rhenn as a stalking horse, and even sets him onto finding out who would want him dead. But the answers aren't as straightforward as they may seem, and more assassins appear out of the woodwork to haunt Rhenn. Can he find the true culprit and bring him to justice before he is killed or once again seriously injured by assassins meant to kill him? And more important, can he protect those close to him who he loves?

I love L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s books, but lately it is becoming all to clear that he has fallen into a rut. Practically all the time I was reading this book, I was having very strong feelings of Deja Vu. And that was because, aside from a few differences, so much of this book has been done before by the author, in the Corean Chronicles and in other books I have read by him. The characters all seem to have the same flaws, and a great deal of the book is the character being taught by their teacher/mentors, excerpts from books and whatnot, learning to defend themselves with the power(s) they have, and learning to use the power better, all the while dealing with family and romancing a beautiful woman who is smarter and more capable than she appears at first glance.

There are minor differences, I will grant you, but none of those minor differences change the stories from feeling almost exactly the same when you read them. It's not that the book is bad... the book is actually very good, and had this been the first one I had enjoyed by L.E. Modesitt Jr., I'd be praising it a lot. But reading this novel felt the same as reading "The Magic of Recluce", and "Legacies", and a lot of his other books besides. It frustrates me because I love his writing, but I don't want to read the same book over and over and over again.

This is not a bad book. It's good. But if you've read L.E. Modesitt Jr. a lot, you are going to find that this book feels extremely familliar- too much so. Cataloguing the ways in which this hero is different from others in L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s books and series doesn't change the fact that so much is the same you'll end up feeling you've read it before, and not long ago at that. I really wish that he would do something different so it doesn't feel like you are just reading the life of the last hero all over again in a world that is only slightly different, because it makes you feel bored rather than excited by the story.