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24 October 2005
Od Magic by Patricia McKillip
K. Joyce Tsai is a compulsive reader who started blogging on books this past year. She graduated from Princeton with a degree in East Asian Studies and a certificate in Japanese. She currently works in an area completely unrelated to anything she has been studying.
In the kingdom of Numis, the Od School of Magic acquires a new gardener, Brenden Vetch. Brenden has a hidden talent for magic, but in Numis, all magic is to be learned at the school and used only in service of king and country. Brenden's arrival coincides with several other disturbances. Rumors of the street performer Tyramin using real magic in the Twilight Quarters have been spreading throughout the kingdom, unsettling the king. If the rumors are true, than there is someone who has never been trained using magic, and that alone is a threat to the kingdom. In the palace, the princess Sulys resists her engagement to one of the most prominent wizards of Numis, while in the Od School of Magic, longtime teacher and magician Yar chafes against the restrictions on how he can and cannot study magic. All seemingly unrelated incidents work together to wear away at the king's control over the country's magic. I always anticipate new novels by McKillip, but while I enjoyed this one, there are quite a few flaws that kept it from the top of my favorites list. While Brenden plays the role of catalyst in the novel, he is present only for the first few chapters and then disappears, only to appear once more at the very end. His mere existence in the novel seems a mystery that McKillip throws in and never satisfactorily resolves. In the end, Brenden remains the least memorable of the cast of characters; he exists mostly as an invisible presence whose role is to influence the plot. There are quite a few interesting characters in this novel whose stories are lost in the complexity. However, I did enjoy the major subplot concerning Tyramin's daughter Mistral and Sulys. While the main theme of the novel concerns the problems of governing magic and bringing learning under the roof of politics, the subplot about the women focuses more on magics that the school overlooks, small magics of thread and cloth that seem trivial next to the apparently more important magic being taught at the school. Bit by bit, McKillip shows how important these overlooked magics are, for the laws concerning magic in Numis are weakening the art and limiting the power of magicians like Yar, who desire to go beyond the standard curriculum. This subplot was reminiscent of her other books. The focus on women's magic echoes themes from The Tower at Stony Wood, and Sulys reminds me of the underestimated princess of Alphabet of Thorn. Still, the above storylines are the strength of the book and its heart; when McKillip writes about Sulys gradually learning that her small tricks are a real and powerful force, when she writes of Yar regretting his tenure at the school and his longing to learn, she succeeded in drawing my attention. Unfortunately, while the main conflict is resolved by the end, pieces of the plot are so spread out through various subplots and characters that I never felt quite satisfied. There is a great deal of potential in the novel--beautiful images of a secret doorway in a cobbler's shop, of empty masks and tapestries full of secrets--but all the strands never cohere into a whole.
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