Customer Rating: 

Not a bad read. The characters are well drawn, and it's certainly a page turner. However there's no escaping the fact that it's a poor copy of Harry Potter - an unusually strong magician is plucked from obscurity, has to work twice as hard as everyone else to get through school, then builds up to a final battle with the 'dark lord'; there's even a nice byline in class prejudice. Sound familiar?

Would have been 3-4 stars if it was released 20 years ago, but now it pales by comparison.

Customer Rating: 

This was a typical, good fantasy book. There was nothing startlingly new about it, but the story was engaging and fast-paced, the characters were likeable or enjoyably not so, and the world was well-defined and interesting.

It has to be said, very little happens in this book in terms of actual plot progression. I felt that, rather than being the first book of a trilogy, this was the first third of a story which just happens to be divided into three separate books. It makes the individual book less satisfying, but I hope that all three are going to cumulatively create one great story.

Customer Rating: 

My mum brought this book home for me to read and when I started reading it, I really enjoyed it. I like the fact that it showed you some of the different characters views e.g. Sonea's view and Lord Rothen's.

The book was about a girl called Sonea living in the slums who finds out she has magical potential when she breaks a magical barrier and hits a magician on the head with a stone. Sonea's friends help her to hide from the magicians who want to capture her, whether to kill her or ask her to join their guild, she doesn't know. I won't give any more of the book away!

Customer Rating: 

I have wanted to read a book by this author for ages after hearing that she's one of the great fantasy writers. I believed her to be a more serious Maria V Snyder. Well, I wanted to love this book and get wrapped up in another world but it just wasn't happening. The story isn't original, magicians go after young girl who has untamed magical ability, but that's not the problem. I really didn't like the writing style, it was just really dull. Events that should have been really exciting like battle scenes and revelations just felt abit flat. I didn't feel excited, I didn't read in a rush of exhilaration desperate to find out what happened. In short, I didn't manage to finish the book.

I got to around page 200 before I gave up. I was frustrated, the young girl was STILL running from the magicians and it was just boring. A scene with the girl and her friends, a scene with the magicians and repeat for page after page. It's a shame really; I wanted to find a really good fantasy series. I don't know why I thought Canavan would be even better than Snyder. I thought Canavan would have fully formed interesting characters but she didn't, they were pretty much cardboard cutouts of stereotypes. Also, the book didn't seem to have a sense of fun about it. Maybe this is just me but when I read Snyder you just knew the author was having fun writing it, the characters were funny the scenes were exciting but Canavan seemed to be taking it all abit too seriously.
I may try to read this book again in the future so I'll give it 2 stars.

Customer Rating: 

This was a really good read! The story was fairly simple and predictable - I found it quite exciting, even though obviously you know what will happen in the end, the chase and hiding is pacey and exciting, there were no sections of the book that I felt were unnecessary or over-long.

Unfortunately there are lots of grammar and punctuation errors (full stops instead of question marks being a big one), which really should have been picked up on before publication. It's just sloppy and in places, ruined the story for me, as it changed the flow of sentences. Pronunciation was sometimes a problem, too - I hate that fantasy books use unusual spellings of words, in my head Sonea is pronounced the same as 'Sonya' and Cery 'Kerry', but I don't know!

I was a little disappointed that it ended quite so suddenly, with everyone discovering the truth in the last 10 pages or so - but again, this is probably to keep the story pacey and avoid unnecessary waffle, and it *is* part of a trilogy, so I'll forgive that! And there are quite a few loose ends (and a particularly big cliff-hanger!), that I look forward to finding more about. Going to go straight onto book 2!