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The Magician's Guild

The Black Magician Trilogy, Book 1

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The Magician's Guild

By: Trudi Canavan
Narrated by: Richard Aspel
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Summary

 Sonea is caught up in a confrontation between the hated Guild magicians and the angry youth of the slums. To her dismay, she discovers that she possesses the same powers as the reviled magicians. To avoid capture, she must seek protection from the city's feared underworld, The Thieves. In return, she must use her powers for them, but her magic never seems to do quite what she intends it to.©2004 Trudi Canavan (P)2004 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd. Fantasy Fiction Magic Users
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Critic reviews

"The first part of the Black Magician Trilogy, this captivating tale has already been hailed by critics as a 'must for lovers of good fantasy'." ( Marie Claire)
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I love fantasy, and the level of detail Canavan puts into Sonea's world is brilliant.

It is beautifully written, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it after having read it back at the start of high school!

Anyone who likes Rowling, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis' Narnia and Gaiman will appreciate this series!

Fantastic Fantasy

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I felt the story was interesting, but the narration was unbearable, the man's voice was akin to Antony Worrall Thompson, all his inflections were in the wrong place and one of his characters sounded like a terrible Winston Churchill, I managed to finish this first book but can't face any more! Such a pity, I cannot understand how Richard Aspell got this gig and kept it for future books!!!

The worst narration ever!

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I found the narrator’s voice irritating, slow and ill-timed with his emphases. I nearly returned, but read other reviews and tried to listen with the view that it is written for children. It felt slow and repetitive and I kept switching off. I think I am not the right audience for it - and it couldn’t compare with the book I listened to before it in terms of depth of characters (the pariah by Anthony Ryan).

More suitable for children?

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Although there are issues with this audiobook (mainly around the narration/production), I still found it very entertaining.

Story – 3.5/5

Reviewing this as a young adult story - it is good. The plot and explanations are simple, and easy to follow, so you don’t need to concentrate too much to keep up with the plot.

There isn’t a lot of action if that is important to you, in fact, there is very little. Instead, the story concentrates on the character and world building. All of the main characters are likeable, and there is a lot of detail provided around the politics, the class system and the magician guild itself.

Being a trilogy, this is clearly the first part of a much larger story, and didn’t really have much of an individual plot that came to an end (like most trilogies tend to have). The ending made way to what the trilogy plot will become, and it definitely sounds like it will be a good read/listen.

The magic system was spot on for the target audience (YA). It was simple in that you either had it or you didn’t, and that it was just called “Magic”, but how to perform spells was described well throughout the training of Sonea.



Performance – 3/5

Richard Aspel isn’t a terrible narrator, he just isn’t great either. He wrongly reads this like it is a child’s novel, and as a consequence over emphasises on the voice acting and makes the younger characters seem very whiney. I wouldn’t let that put you off the story though; I personally got used to it and was still able to enjoy it. His positives are that he describes things and portrays the mood of the scenes well, and gives each character a distinctly recognisable voice.

With regards to the production of the audiobook – there are regular pauses of a few seconds in-between sentences. After an hour or two, it was easy not to notice, but this may bother some people more than me. I would advise listening to the sample before purchasing

Overall – 3.5/5

Quite Entertaining

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I read this book and adored it. I struggle with reading these days. and trying to listen to this is awful. It feels like the narrator is taking a few sips of water between every sentence, and the difference between voices is very limited.

Too....much.... hesitation.

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