Book Review: Son of a Witch

The sequel to Wicked is not its equal. Neither as imaginative nor as gripping, it is nevertheless an excellent reading experience.

Either Mr Maguire had a singularly lonely existence, or he chooses to make his protagonists exceedingly lonely. Liir, the protagonist in this book, is monumentally a loner. More so than his mother ever was. Part of this is his personal feeling of separation - never knowing who his mother was, growing up without any real friends in a mountain castle. Who wouldn't feel out of place in the Emerald City if they grew up in such a solitary situation? But part of it (and this is the best part about the book) is Liir's very conscious self dialog about his own nature. Is he a success? A failure? An obedient servant of the Empire and thus not accountable for what the Empire requires of him? A murderer of children? A magician? Is he even whole?

In a very opposite way to most of the mass-market fiction I read, Liir is very humanly messy. He does not come forth out of the author's head fully formed, a la Zeus or Harry Potter. He's a mess. And it takes him the entire book to get a handle on where to even start with defining who he is.

The book moves along pretty well. Maguire is not bound to put a certain amount of chronological time into a certain amount of pages. There are minutes that take a page, and 9 months that take 20 pages. He slows the book down when the action requires it. Takes some getting used to, but it's very pleasant. And Liir, overall, is a likable character. I wish the best for him, and feel for his background that leaves him so poorly prepared for life among other humans.

The book has 2 major flaws in my mind. One is my puritanism coming through: sex in these books is casual in every sense of the word. Commitment and sex do not go together, fidelity is not something any character strives for. If a spouse is faithful, it's simply by chance. This is not the way the world really works, is it? I don't think it is. But why Maguire chooses to separate commitment from sex is beyond me. I think it's an affectation of this type of fiction, and it saddens me. The other major flaw is that key plot elements just seem contrived. Princess Nastoya knows that Liir can help her, but how he ends up doing it is flagrantly contrived and completely unnatural. "It's the end of the book, and I have to have Liir help her, how can I do that in 5 pages?" Frankly, the whole Nastoya subplot was poorly executed. But this idea of fate pulling the strings and characters unknowingly doing what fate has decreed for them robs the characters of some of their nobility.

A good book, one which makes one think. And that's good, because you then have to sift out the moral issues from the writing issues, and come to a better understanding of the piece as a whole.

Now I need to check out the 3rd installment and complete the series. Time to see what the Thropp 5th Descending will do.