I would like to start this off by saying that this is a series I likely would have read ages ago (the third one came out in paperback in ’04) except for one reason: the cover art stinks.
I hate to admit it but I really did wrong by judging these books by their covers but I did. They just reminded me of the look of old RPG mid-80s gaming art of the worse sort, the book covers that just screamed out that the contents were mediocre and bland.
Which the Black Magician Trilogy was not. I ended up reading all three books over four days, the first one over Tuesday and Wednesday on my bus commutes to and from work and then the second book got read in one sitting on Thursday after work and then the third the same way on Friday.
The trilogy is the story of Sonea, a girl from the slums, who discovers her talent for magic at the worse possible time.
The first book, The Magicians Guild, starts during the Purge, the one day a year when the magicians come out of the Guild and drive all the poor and homeless from the city. Shielded with the magic the magicians of the Guild had never had any worries while taking part in the Purge until Sonea (one of those poor that they were to drive from the city) in her anger throws a rock that pierces their magic shielding and knocks one of them upside the head.
Which, as you can imagine, they don’t take well at all.
Not just because she hit one of them with a rock but because it means she must be a rogue magician which makes her a threat to the Guild, the city and to herself.
That basically sums up the plot of the first book, and I can’t really talk about the story of the 2nd and 3rd without spoiling how the first one turns out.
I can say this about the series however: I wish there were more of it.
At the end of the third book the story is wrapped up nicely to a satisfying conclusion but at the same time I was left wondering what was yet to come for the characters. It felt less like the end of their story but more like it could be just the end to the first part of a much larger story.
Which, I think, says good things for a book series when you are both satisfied with the ending but wanting to read more of it at the same time.
I hadn’t read anything by Trudi Canavan before this but I think I am going to have to look up the other series she has written the next time I go book-buying and see if they are as good as this trilogy was.
Edit: Since I first wrote this review she has also written The Magician’s Apprentice which I talk about in my August 2010 “What I’ve Read Lately” post and is also a very enjoyable book.