The Fuller’s Apprentice by Angela Holder – I picked this up on a free promotion, but it’s well worth purchasing. This is a clean fantasy series, and this first book is a unique coming-of-age young adult story. It’s clean but doesn’t completely shy away from some uglier, darker parts of life. But you, the reader, don’t have to see the ugliness in any detail that might be inappropriate even for younger readers. Recommended for readers looking for generosity and unashamedly altruistic characters. I’ll be following this series as well.
All Josiah wants is a little excitement. His work as an apprentice fuller is boring, and playing in the mill’s machinery isn’t that dangerous. Everything goes fine—at first.
All right, he’s lucky the wizard Elkan and his familiar, a donkey named Sar, are there to save his life. Even better, when his furious master fires him, Elkan offers him a job as his assistant. Josiah jumps at the chance. Traveling around Tevenar for a year, meeting all sorts of interesting people, helping the dedicated young wizard and clever donkey serve them with the Mother’s healing magic—what could be more fun?
But Josiah soon learns that while matters of life and death may be exciting, they’re seldom fun. Impulsive actions, even when taken with the best of intentions, can have devastating consequences. And some choices have the power to change the future of Tevenar forever.
This book review originally appeared on C. J. Brightley’s blog.
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Mike also reviewed this book:
The setting of this book is neither dystopian nor purely utopian, but it is a worthy world: one in which people are generally well-intentioned and helpful, where almost everyone unequivocally condemns violence, where the whole society is built around working at honest trades. There’s no ruling class, as such; the guildmasters fill that role, and they rise in their trades rather than being hereditary rulers. Everyone belongs to a guild – not necessarily their parents’ guild; though that’s often the case, anyone can apprentice to almost any trade that appeals to them.
One of those guilds is the Wizards’ Guild, although in D&D terms they’re not wizards, but clerics, empowered by the divine Mother. They can heal, open “windows” which allow them to see through time and space within limits (and hence establish the truth of disputed events in court, like having universal CCTV), and move objects with a form of telekinesis. They are unique in being specifically called to their guild by the Mother, rather than choosing it. And each one has a familiar, an animal they must work with and without whom they have no power, in order to keep them humble.
Built upon this background is a well-told, compelling story of a young apprentice fuller who, through his poorly-thought-through typically-early-teenage actions, ends up as an assistant to a journeyman wizard. As the wizard travels round the country districts on a circuit in order to qualify as a master, they encounter bandits and other people who are not fully aligned with the worthy society, as well as natural disasters and other major challenges. In the process, the journeyman’s faith is tested, the apprentice learns a lot (including by making significant mistakes, because his good heart and sense of adventure aren’t yet sufficiently tempered by wisdom), and important things change for the society as a whole, setting up for the next book to be quite different. Though the society is worthy and most of the characters good-hearted, there’s no lack of conflict or challenge here.
While there were a good many apostrophe glitches and a few typos, this is otherwise well-edited, and certainly very capable from a storytelling perspective. I’ll be bearing this series in mind when I’m next in the mood for something noblebright.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads.. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
