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The characters of the Magician Books battle a new enemy in this book. The book centers around Prince Arthura's poisoned wife and the quest to find the cure. There seems to have been some criticism of this book for being a fantasy cliche (something which people seem to say about a lot of Feist's books), but that's a pretty easy accusation to make with fantasy works -- they all seem to have the same basic them. I guess that's what a genre is -- a shared theme. The book is well written and quite readable. Wikipedia page on Silverthorn has this rather startling accusation to make: Since its release, the term 'Silverthorn' has been adopted to describe any book in a series (although typically the middle book of a trilogy) that has served little purpose other than to set up a climax in the final book. This term can also be applied to a similar phenomenon in film or television series. This style of book typically has little overall substance, and is often quite poor when compared to the other books in the series. That's a pretty unfair thing to say. This book has a story that stands on its…

I was bored this afternoon, so I tweaked my bloxsom plugin which was already using ISBN number tags to produce links to LibraryThing. It now fetches cover art for the book (if available) and puts that into posts magically. If you're interested in such things its really easy to fetch cover images from LibraryThing.

Perhaps it would have been better if Feist had kept Magician all as one book. In the first book you hear of Guy (a bad guy!) briefly, and then nothing more. Then, hundreds of pages later in the second book he comes up again as a major plot element. If you haven't recently read the first book, then you are at a disadvantage. Apart from that, this is a good book that I would have preferred to read faster. Unfortunately work has kept me unusually busy recently, so this one took a while to read.

This is the reworked version of Magician, although its split into two books and there is some content that was dropped as part of the editing process for the original version. This version was developed for the tenth anniversary of the original publication. I read the original version as a kid and was so proud of myself when it finished it -- it was by far the longest book I had ever read at the time. I've seen people online complain that this book is just a big ball of cliche. There are dwarves, wizards with funny hats, elves, and so on. But there are also new ideas here, such as alien invaders in a fantasy novel and so on. Overall I think the cliches don't get in the way and are largely used a sort of short hand... Feist doesn't need to explain what a dwarf is, so he can skip that bit and get on with telling the story. After rereading this as an adult, I still really like this book.