Twisted Kingdom

To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. But though his courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely Princess, he was ill at ease with the normal ways of wizardry. Yet Pug's strange sort of magic would one day change forever the fates of two worlds. For dark beings from another world had opened a rift in the fabric of spacetime to being again the age-old battle between the forces of Order and Chaos.

After reading Flight of the Nighthawks back in April, I decided it was time to go back in the pages to the first book in Raymond Feist's career. I was a little worried because people had told me that Pug, the main character, had annoyed them in this book. It was not a problem for me, though. I think it was actually good that I had read a later book because instead of seeing Pug as an annoyance, I saw him as the character that would grow up to be in Flight of the Nighthawk.

This is the book that explains how Pug became Pug. It is in this book that he gets the chance to become a magicians apprentice and learn the trade that will be so vital in his future. By the title, us as readers know that this what will occur for him, but on the day that the townspeople pick their apprentices, Pug is the very last one chosen. He fears that no one will pick him and then he will have to leave forever, but the King's Magician assures that does not happen and steps forward to offer Pug an opportunity that few will ever get the chance to experience.

It is actually aways interesting to me when an author puts enough time into a series that you can actually watch a fictional character grow up. Pug is just a child in this book, but by Feist's newest series he is by all accounts a grandfather, even if his son did not actually provide the sperm that made the children. I think that as a whole this series will be interesting because you get to watch Pug grow up from an annoying little kid to the very powerful adult. To watch him struggle to learn how to use magic was amazing, to see him be the brave soul that saved the princess was actually a little funny, and to watch his country be thrown into war a time for the cast of characters to grow.

This is book one in the Riftwar Saga. I look forward to reading the future books in this series.