The Riftwar Saga (Books 1-2)

Okay so this is a 4 book series, but since I've been going through them pretty fast I'm just going to do them all together. I'll probably give the most detail on the first book but then not so much on the other books because I don't want to spoil anything.

Okay so the Riftwar Saga is by Raymond Feist and it's a fantasy series so if you like elves and dwarves and dragons and a number of other creatures that honestly I've never even heard of, then this is probably the series for you.

1) Magician: Apprentice

This book is a young boy named Pug who becomes apprenticed to the magician Kulgan. If you've ever read the Ranger's Apprentice Series (I believe I've done a post about it in the past): I was getting major Ranger's Apprentice vibes from the first couple chapters, which honestly is super okay with me because I really enjoyed the Ranger's Apprentice series. Anyway so Pug is apprenticed to a magician and is going about his normal apprentice-ship duties when one day there is a shipwreck on the coast of the town that they live in. However, this is no normal shipwreck. The boat and the lone survivor of the wreck are both foreign to the Kingdom (this is where they live) and no one has ever seen anything like it before. After some fancy magic stuff they discover that the ship and survivor are from a different world entirely. However, they don't know why. Naturally there is suspicion of a future invasion leading the a group of people (including Pug) to go on an adventure to secure troops from the King, but it's a bit more complicated than this because politics and intrigue. Yay politics and intrigue! <-- not sarcastic, it was actually really well-written :)

Anyway so this book was really good. The world-building is absolutely AMAZING! Everything is so thought out and you get the history of the different races that live in this world. However, this history is given out a little bit at a time so you just keep reading to learn more. Another thing that I liked about this book is that between chapters sometimes it will jump across large periods of time and then fill in the stuff that happened during that time as memories (not flashbacks per-say but the character will be thinking about stuff that happened), which I enjoyed because it was really different than other books that I've read. I think my least favorite part of the book is that a lot of the characters have really different names and some of the names are really weird so it's kind of hard to keep track of everyone sometimes (but this is a bigger issue in the second book I think). Also, it might just be me but I went a whole 3 chapters forgetting a person existed and thinking they were referring to a different person the whole time (again I think this was in the second book and also because I kept reading this book at like 1 in the morning when I normally am asleep).

2) Magician: Master

Okay so just so you know, if you go to buy this series in like half-price books or something, you might see the book Magician, and be like whaaaaa??? That's not a book in this series!! And that's because, the first 2 books are sometimes combined into 1 book and that book is called Magician. The reason being that the first 2 books are very clearly continuations of each other, and despite the fact that all 4 books in the series should be continuations of each other because they're a series, I found that after the second book, the series could honestly end there -- it's nice, it ties up all the loose ends. Of course, I kept reading because the world-building is 10/10 and I got really attached to some of the characters, but I think that's why the first 2 books are sometimes combined.

So I don't really want to give explain what happens in this book because it will give away the ending of the first book which was just so good and I don't want to spoil so all I'm going to say is that stuff (almost used a cuss word there oops) happens and Pug becomes a super powerful magician.

A couple notes about this book: it takes place 4 years after the first book ends and it's preceded by a little blurb thing that summarizes the first book and gives the context for the second book. Again, it also explains what happens during those 4 years through the thoughts of characters which is cool. I also think the summary blurb is super helpful and all books should have them because sometimes if there's a long gap between me reading books in a series I do not remember what happened in the previous book making the series less than enjoyable for me which is not the case here! I think all books should have this... just saying...

Anyway, so, really good book. Lots of confusing names but it's okay. Amazing history of the world. Highly recommend. And this post is getting pretty long so I'll do the next 2 books in a separate post. Might actually take me a bit cause I haven't read the fourth book yet haha. Just got it though and I'm very excited! Byeee!