Queen of Sorcery

Well it’s a very enjoyable romp but it’s been many years since I first read it and some parts don’t hold up as well. It’s a bit sexist, mysoginistic. Oddly prudish.
Probably not as enjoyable for a female reader.
The story makes the females characters seem wise on the surface, but the more you unpack it, the more they seem to be subservient to the male characters. Also the females seem to be considered to be temperamental and a burden for the male characters to endure. A lot of whore/Madonna dichotomy too.
Also.. the subtext is pretty racist and the various people’s of this fantasy world are very clearly stereotypes of various real world cultures. And many of them are not favorably represented.
So if you can see the bad guys as unique to this fantasy world and not characatures of certain real groups, and if you take it on the surface as a boy’s coming of age fantasy tale and if you can avoid thinking of the subtext, it’s fun.
So it’s like reading HP Lovecraft. His stories are brilliant. Clearly the founding father of modern Science fiction and of modern horror. The creator of countless tropes and archetypes that are used in narrative fiction to this day. Yet he was horribly racist, and I can’t say he was a mysoginist only because female characters never really appear. But Lovecraft’s worries definitely fail the Bechdel/Wallace test. Even though there are many females in the Belgariad series, and even though several of them are powerful sourcerers, I’d say that the Belgariad series also fails the Bechdel/Wallace test.
So take it for what it is.

I’m currently doing a re-read of the series. It’s probably been ~15 years since I last read it. I’m still finding it enjoyable. You do have to take it for what it is, though. I’m not going to hold it up and say that it’s better written than some of the writers I enjoy today. I imagine it was even the best of it’s time, but I enjoyed reading it when I was younger, and still enjoyed it today.

I said in my review of the first book that it doesn’t shy from having a lot of classic fantasy tropes. However, it was written when a lot of them weren’t tropes, but interesting reads. I don’t mind it, because a trope is something that was so popular that everyone was using it. Being a trope isn’t a bad thing, it can just make it slightly predictable. That’s only a bad thing if you’re trying to surprise the reader with a twist. You can even use the reader’s perception that they know where it’s going against them . These books do it better than a lot of writers do.

The characters all feel like they have depth and that they led lives before you started reading the book. You can feel that there is a lot of history to the world and the characters are acting and having to deal with that history in the story we’re reading.

As in my first review, I think the biggest downside is the adherence that each race is strictly individual. They’re treated almost as different species. Each kingdom tends to share the same views, ideas, and ways of thinking. Sometimes to the point where they all look the same. This isn’t realistic, but black-and-white fantasy was popular for a long time. Now it’s preferable to have shades of grey, where the hero might actually be a pretty lousy person, but is the hero nonetheless.

Having said that, the author then goes to write characters as individuals. Chereks are written as all being tall, heavily muscled, bearded vikings but you clearly feel the difference when you’re reading about Barak, Grinneg, or Anheg. Drasnians are all talked about as sneeky, scheeming, ploters and cheaters, we can clearly tell the difference when reading about Silk, his Uncle, or the other drasnians we meet along the way. They come off as individuals. I think the Drasnian sterotype is fairly true as shown in the book. However, I think that’s more a matter of you mostly meeting Drasnian spys who would probably tend to have a similar mindset.

The book was fairly fast paced as well. I was really getting into it, then I came to the end. It has a solid conclusion, but leaves you on a cliff hanger for the next book.

So while it’s a little dated, I think it has history, unique characters, and tells a story in a way that I haven’t seen other place. I think it’s really worth the read.

I fell in love with the series The Belgariad in the late 1980’s. I bought them all and then the follow up series The Mallorian. When my eye sight started to fail, I was unable to read regular print books. I have checked through the years for the release of this series as E-Books. I’m still waiting on the Mallorian to be released and an E-Book. But I have read the Belgariad series twice since I purchased them last month.

I love The Belgariad series since it was published back in the ’80s. I won’t go into details about the story here. I was happy to learn that kindle version finally became available. I wish Amazon would make ALL its books in the series (5 books in The Belgariad, 5 more in THe Malloreon) available all at once so I don’t have to keep checking if the nth book has become available in kindle or not. it’s been available in the AmazonUK but can’t purchase them from the US, so…. biting my nails waiting for them to become available…

The Belgariad has been one of my favorite stories for a long time and I finally picked it up in Kindle format. I re-read it every few years. I’m hoping that Amazon brings out all of Eddings’ books in Kindle format, including the full Belgariad and Mallorean series and the Saphire Rose and Tamuli series. There’s nothing particularly new about Eddings’ work, but I enjoy his characters. The series is somewhat Tolkein-esque in that all four of the series mentioned have essentially the same “small band of heroes on an epic search for the lost or stolen object” plot set in different backgrounds, but I still find them all enjoyable reads with interesting characters. Eddings and his wife write characters that you will come to care about and their take on the male-female relationship provides a humorous backdrop to much of the storyline. As with many Kindle books there are the inevitable typos, some of which are fairly intrusive here since they have substituted the wrong word consistently throughout some of the dialog. While annoying, and in this instance a little bit disruptive to the reading process since the substituted word is used fairly frequently and has been consistently replaced by a completely unrelated word, I’ve come to expect those types of issues with electronic books (and to a lesser extent hard copy books for that matter) these days and I can usually overlook them.

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