Circle of Magic by Tamora Pierce || Some Thoughts (By Amna)

This series comprises of “Sandry’s Book”, “Tris’s Book”, ”Daja’s Book” and “Briar’s Book”.

Quite some time before actually reading the books I caught a glimpse of the first 3 pages from Elvenarya’s bookshelf. The start seemed good so I got it and started reading it.

Sandry’s Book

The story started out fine but after reading about half of it I realized it was getting nowhere. It was just a happy little life story of 4 bratty kids and a dog . I kept waiting for something anywhere near interesting to happen, but in vain. The book refused to hand over anything even mildly enjoyable. I totally hated everything in the book from the teachers to the trainees, the bratty kids to the bratty dog and especially all the unnecessary details. As expected, I found myself skipping pages……not being a long book skipping all the boring things (which unfortunately made up most of the book) meant that I finished it far earlier than expected. My reaction throughout reading and after the book was one of boredom. It was only near the end that something happened in a plot that crawled at a snail’s pace all through the novel.

Nevertheless the author has written many good books so I decided to give the second book a shot. Also I had heard that it was the best of the series so I thought I’d give the author another chance.

Tris’s Book

 ‘Tris’s Book ’ was far superior to the first one, the plot pacing was better, there was more depth added to the characters. I liked the author’s writing style and her vivid descriptions, but these descriptions are a double edged sword when her pacing slows down it starts to weigh down the writing. Unfortunately this one suffered from the middle book syndrome of building up on characters and world building from the first novel at the cost of plot flow and so eventually the pacing got bogged down. In my opinion the books major weakness is the absence of any significant plot developments or events. I agree that the four characters along with their teachers did lots of activities depending on their powers but it amounted little in the overall scheme of things.  It failed to pull me in and lacked that special factor that makes one just fall in love with the pages. Being underwhelmed by the second book I have dropped the series. But since I do like her style of writing, I may just pick up another one of her series sometime in the future.