Review: Bland and Generic
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 13, 2012
Oh dear.I picked up this book hoping based on the description for some light-hearted fantasy, perhaps in the style of the early Piers Anthony Xanth novels.I knew it was going to be rough going when I noticed the first typo during the first page of the author's introduction. I don't usually pay much attention to things like that, even books from the big publishers are prone to a few. But there were several more in the next few pages and to make matters worse the formatting was messed up.This was all distracting, but it wouldn't have been that big a deal if the story was strong enough. Unfortunately it isn't.The author references role playing as one of the sources of material for the story and unfortunately it shows. The setting seems to be a very generic Dungeons and Dragons fantasy land. I say seems to be, because we really never get a feel for it. The names of a couple of places are mentioned but we never get anything resembling a description of them never mind the politics and interactions of these places.In part this is because all the events take place at the blandly named Magic University. But you would think the disparate group of characters might make some reference to these things...This blandness and lack of distinct detail is also present in the characters. Yes one's a dwarf and one's an elf, but I found that for the first hundred or so pages, when a name was mentioned I couldn't remember which was which. Never a good sign.The magic is equally without character. They're all magic users of some sort of course, but we don't get a feel for any sort of systems of magic. People just cast spells. Again it strongly reminds me of Dungeons and Dragons which has one of most generic magic systems ever devised. You would think that at a Magic University, there might be some discussion of the hows and whys of magic.There's nothing horrible here. It's just all so... bland. We are presented with far too many characters, most of which don't really do anything and the character arcs (limited as they are) are predictable from the start of the story.There's no sense of danger either. At no point did I feel like any of the characters was remotely at risk even when they were hurling lightning bolts and fireballs around.It's an inoffensive read, but you'd be better of picking up something else.