In the remote village of Mandryn, Tessia serves as assistant to her father, the village healer — much to the frustration of her mother, who would rather she found a husband. Despite knowing that women aren’t readily accepted by the Guild of Healers, Tessia is determined to follow in her father’s footsteps. But her life is about to take a very unexpected turn.

When treating a patient at the residence of the local magician, Lord Dakon, Tessia is forced to fight off the advances of a visiting Sachakan (a neighbouring country that had ruled Kyralia, Tessia’s country, centuries ago) magician and instinctively uses magic. She now finds herself facing an entirely different future as Lord Dakon’s apprentice.
Although there are long hours of study and self-discipline, Tessia’s new life also offers more opportunities than she had ever hoped for, and an exciting new world opens up to her. There are fine clothes and servants and, she is delighted to learn, regular trips to the great city of Imardin.
To make things worse, or better, Lord Dakon already has an apprentice, a young man named Jayan and the two do not exactly see eye to eye at the onset.
That, however, changes — quite predictably — as the book progresses.
But along with the excitement and privilege, Tessia is about to discover that her magical gifts bring with them a great deal of responsibility. Events are brewing that will lead nations into war, rival magicians into conflict and spark an act of sorcery so brutal that its effects will be felt for centuries. Amidst all this Tessia will realise that she can actually heal with the help of magic, something not thought possible before.
Trouble starts when a group of renegade Sachakan magicians invade Kyralia, against their king’s wishes, to retake glory and land lost to them centuries back and Lord Dakon’s lands are one of the first to be overrun. A war of attrition begins and the Sachakans move from area to area killing everyone in sight and taking their “power” to enhance their magic.
The Magician’s Apprentice is a standalone prequel to Trudi Canavan’s popular Black Magician Trilogy and the incidents takes places centuries before The Magician’s Guild, the first book of the trilogy.
Followers of Canavan’s books will find themselves in familiar territory while first-time readers might get a bit flummoxed with the unknown names of animals, plants etc. The book starts off well but unfortunately peters out after around 150 pages and one cannot but help wonder why the author took 700-odd pages to tell a story that could have been much more enjoyable and less time consuming if told in, say, 300 pages.
The plot is good enough and the characters well thought-out but one of the things that go against The Magician’s Apprentice is that it is too slow, almost bordering on boring at places.
Canavan is great at portraying characters: Tessia, always looking to heal with her powers, Lord Dakon, a kind and gentle landlord who takes his responsibility as a master magician very seriously, Jayan, the senior apprentice who is initially unsure about Tessia and the antagonist Takado, mostly cruel but sometimes displaying flashes of humanity. The book, however, falls prey to the same malady that plagues all but the most brilliant fantasy science fiction writers these days: Logic.
Readers are bound to question how only a handful (around 20 to begin with) of Sachakan magicians take over huge tracts of land without facing any opposition and why don’t the Kyralian magicians who are pursuing them at an annoyingly sedate pace ever catch up?
The Sachakans have no qualms about taking power from their slaves and every magician has stored lots of power from periodically tapping their slaves. The Kyralian magicians, not being a slave society, can only take power from their apprentices. Lord Dakon and his colleagues repeatedly discuss how their enemies are thus much more powerful but whenever the two groups meet for frontal assaults, the Kyrilians, inexplicably, always win.
Perhaps what will gall readers the most is that for a book about magic and magicians, The Magician’s Apprentice has very little action, or in other words, magic.
One of the main reasons that the Harry Potter books are such unprecedented bestsellers is that every page is action-packed with magic literally oozing out of the books and this is where Canavan misses out.
However, all said and done, Canavan does well to explain the history of the magician’s guild which is the central theme of her Black Magician Trilogy and her fans will not be disappointed with The Magician’s Apprentice.